MUSEUMS, SEXUALITY, AND GENDER

ACTIVISM

Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism examines the role of exhibitionary institutions in
representing LGBTQ+ people, cisgender women, and nonbinary individuals. Considering
recent gender and sexuality-related developments through a critical lens, the volume
contributes significantly to the growing body of activist writing on this topic.
Building on Gender, Sexuality, and Museums and featuring work from established voices, as
well as newcomers, this volume offers risky and exciting articles from around the world.
Chapters cover diverse topics, including transgender representation, erasure, and activism;
two-spirit people, indigeneity, and museums; third genders; gender and sexuality in heritage
sites and historic homes; temporary exhibitions on gender and sexuality; museum repre-
sentations of HIV/AIDS; interventions to increase queer visibility and inclusion in galleries;
LGBTQ+ staff alliances; and museums, gender ambiguity, and the disruption of binaries.
Several chapters focus on areas outside the USA and Europe, while others explore central
topics through the perspectives of racial and ethnic minorities.
Containing contributions that engage in sustained critique of current policies, theory, and
practice, Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is essential reading for those studying
museums, women and gender, sexuality, culture, history, heritage, art, media, and anthro-
pology. The book will also spark interest among museum practitioners, public archivists, and
scholars researching related topics.

Joshua G. Adair is an associate professor of English at Murray State University, where he

also serves as coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. Adair’s work, whether in literary,
historical, or museum studies, examines the ways we narrate – and silence – gender and
sexuality; it has appeared in over fifty scholarly and creative nonfiction journals.

Amy K. Levin served as Director of Women’s Studies, Coordinator of Museum Studies,

and Chair of English at Northern Illinois University for twenty-one years before beginning a
new career as an independent scholar in 2016. Most recently, Levin was a visiting professor
in Public History at the University of Amsterdam in fall 2017.
MUSEUM MEANINGS

Series Editors
Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps

Museums have undergone enormous changes in recent decades; an ongoing process of

renewal and transformation bringing with it changes in priority, practice and role as well as
new expectations, philosophies, imperatives and tensions that continue to attract attention
from those working in, and drawing upon, wide ranging disciplines.
Museum Meanings presents new research that explores diverse aspects of the shifting social, cultural
and political significance of museums and their agency beyond, as well as within, the cultural sphere.
Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and international perspectives and empirical investigation are
brought to bear on the exploration of museums’ relationships with their various publics (and analysis
of the ways in which museums shape – and are shaped by – such interactions).
Theoretical perspectives might be drawn from anthropology, cultural studies, art and art his-
tory, learning and communication, media studies, architecture and design and material culture
studies amongst others. Museums are understood very broadly – to include art galleries, historic
sites and other cultural heritage institutions – as are their relationships with diverse constituencies.
The focus on the relationship of the museum to its publics shifts the emphasis from objects
and collections and the study of museums as text, to studies grounded in the analysis of
bodies and sites; identities and communities; ethics, moralities and politics.

Learning in the Museum

George Hein

Colonialism and the Object

Empire, Material Culture and the Museum
Edited by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn

Museum Activism
Edited by Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell

Exhibitions for Social Justice

Elena González

Museums and Sites of Persuasion

Politics, Memory and Human Rights
Joyce Apsel and Amy Sodaro

Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism

Edited by Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin

https://www.routledge.com/Museum-Meanings/book-series/SE0349
MUSEUMS, SEXUALITY,
AND GENDER ACTIVISM

Edited by Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin; individual chapters,
the contributors.
The right of Joshua G. Adair and Amy K. Levin to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 9780367195090 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780367195106 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429202889 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS

List of figures viii

List of contributors x
Acknowledgments xviii

PART I
Frameworks 1
Joshua G. Adair
1 Introduction: Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism 5
Amy K. Levin
2 Chicana Feminism, Anzalduian Borderland Practices, and Critiques
of Museology 21
Amanda K. Figueroa
3 Warning! Heteronormativity: A Question of Ethics 31
Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

PART II
Dismantling the Master’s House? 39
Amy K. Levin
A. Major Institutions 43
4 Sex and Sensitivities: Exhibiting and Interpreting Shunga at the
British Museum 45
Stuart Frost
5 Activists on the Inside: The Victoria and Albert Museum LGBTQ
Working Group 57
Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin
vi Contents

6 Remolding the Museum: In Residence at the V&A 69

Matt Smith
B. Alternate Spaces 79
7 Pop-Up or Permanent? The Case of the Mardi Gras Museum 81
Tuan Nguyen
8 Emptied, Displaced, Assimilated: Spatial Politics of Gender in Ankara
Ulucanlar Prison Museum 90
Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş
9 Death of a Museum Foretold? On Sexual Display in the Time of AIDS
in India 101
Rovel Sequeira
10 Lost Objects and Missing Histories: HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 113
Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

PART III
Bodies in the Museum? 127
Joshua G. Adair
A. Indigenous Bodies 131
11 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: Artist Curation as Queer
Decolonial Museum Practice 133
Ann Cvetkovich
12 All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land 145
Camille Georgeson-Usher
B. Bodies of Ambiguity 155
13 The Future of Museological Display: Chitra Ganesh’s
Speculative Encounters 157
Natasha Bissonauth
14 Nonbinary Difference: Dionysus, Arianna, and the Fictive Arts of
Museum Photography 167
Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

PART IV
Acts of Resistance 181
Amy K. Levin
A. Unruly Women 185
 Contents vii

15 The Absent History of Female Volunteers at the Art Gallery of Toronto 187
Irina D. Mihalache
16 From Handmade Underwear to the Labor Movement: Women’s
History at Digital Museum 197
Jana Sverdljuk
17 Recording Change: Collecting the Irish Abortion Rights
Referendum, 2018 207
Brenda Malone
B. Problematic Narratives 217
18 Never Going Underground: Community Coproduction and the Story of
LGBTQ+ Rights 219
Catherine O’Donnell
19 Curating Gertrude Stein: Identity Politics in the Exhibition Catalogue 231
Hayden Hunt
20 “A Battlefield All Their Own”: Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact at
Plantation Museums 239
Joshua G. Adair

PART V
Thinking Outside the Binary Box 253
Amy K. Levin
21 On Gender Fluidity and Photographic Portraiture 255
Michael Petry
22 Never a Small Project: Welcoming Transgender Communities into
the Museum 265
Mirjam Sneeuwloper, Amy K. Levin, Colline Horstink and
Yvo Manuel Vas Dias
23 “A Museum Can Never Be Queer Enough”: The Van Abbemuseum as
a Testing Ground for Institutional Queering 278
Anne Rensma, Daniel Neugebauer and Olle Lundin
24 Conclusion 288
Joshua G. Adair

Index 294
FIGURES

4.1 A samurai makes love to a young man, and a woman adjusts their
bedding. Opening scene from a painted scroll with twelve erotic
scenes, early 1600s 51
5.1 Rubyyy Jones at the “Queer & Now” Friday Late in February 2015 63
6.1 A 31 Note Love Song (detail), Black Parian, 2015. Victoria and Albert
Museum, London 71
6.2 When All Is Equal, Black Porcelain, 2016. Victoria and Albert
Museum, London 72
6.3 From Butch to Camp. Victoria and Albert Museum, London 75
8.1 One of the emptied units and yards. Ulucanlar Prison Museum,
Ankara 94
9.1 Skeletons in the Closet. Antarang Museum, Mumbai 104
11.1 Installation view of Scent of a Beaver in Shame and Prejudice: A Story of
Resilience. Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2017. Curated by
Kent Monkman 136
11.2 Installation view of Starvation Table in Shame and Prejudice: A Story of
Resilience. Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2017. Curated by
Kent Monkman 138
12.1 Still from Melissa General, Reclamation, 2014 150
14.1 Arianna (Sculptura Antica), n.d. Photographer unknown. Archivio
Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini 168
14.2 Dionysus and Arianna. 169
14.3 Dionysus and Arianna, 2018 174
16.1 Screenshot of a search fragment: Kvinnehistorie [women’s story] 202
17.1 Repeal banner, knitted by Anne Phalen, using the Maser Design 210
18.1 Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights exhibition.
People’s History Museum, Manchester, UK 223
 List of figures ix

19.1 Gertrude Stein sitting on a sofa in her Paris studio, with a portrait of
her by Pablo Picasso 235
21.1 Untitled, from Looking Out, Looking in, 2015 260
22.1 Transmission exhibition. Amsterdam Museum, June 17–September 18,
2016 270
23.1 Qwearing the Collection opening 283
CONTRIBUTORS

Joshua G. Adair is an associate professor of English at Murray State University, where he also
serves as coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. Adair’s work, whether in literary, historical,
or museum studies, examines the ways we narrate – and silence – gender and sexuality; it has
appeared in over fifty scholarly and creative nonfiction journals. His recent publications include
Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities,
second edition (edited with Amy K. Levin; Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); “O [Queer] Pioneers:
Narrating Queer Lives in Virtual Museums” (Museum & Society 2017); “The Art of Shrinking:
Minority Stress, Coping, and Camp in Beverley Nichols's Merry Hall Trilogy,” authored with
Rebekah Goemaat, (Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2016); and “Not Satisfied with the Ending:
Connecting The World in the Evening to Maurice,” in The American Isherwood, edited by Jim Berg
and Christopher Freeman (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Meral Akbaş is a PhD candidate and research assistant in the Sociology Department at
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She obtained Masters’ degrees in
Sociology from Middle East Technical University and Anthropology from Hacettepe Uni-
versity, while her Bachelor’s degree is from the Sociology Department at Middle East
Technical University. In her thesis on anthropology, she studied memories of female political
prisoners who were held at Mamak Military Prison after the 1980 military coup in Turkey,
which was published as Mamak Kitabı: Biz Bir Orduya Kafa Tuttuk Arkadaş (The Book of
Mamak: We Challenged an Army My Friend!, published by Ayizi Kitap, 2011). Akbaş is
now preparing her doctoral dissertation on memories of state violence in Batman in South-
eastern Turkey. She writes extensively about gender, social memory, state ethnography,
violence, and feminist literature in Turkey.

Natasha Bissonauth (PhD in Art History, Cornell University) is an assistant professor in

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of Wooster. Prior to her doctoral
studies, she worked in commercial art galleries and arts nonprofits in New York City,
focusing on modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her research centers on queer and
feminist artmaking in contemporary global visual cultures with an emphasis on South Asia
 List of contributors xi

and its transnational circuits of art. Her book project investigates how playful aesthetics –
such as parody, camp, satire, and the carnivalesque – reshape the visual culture of difference.
She has published artist interviews, exhibition reviews, and profile pieces in publications such
as Art Asia Pacific, Art India, Art & Deal, C Magazine, Exposure, and SAMAR. Peer-reviewed
articles include “Zanele Muholi’s Affective Appeal to Act” (Photography & Culture 2014) and
“Sunil Gupta’s Sun City: An Exercise in Camping Orientalism” (Art Journal 2019).

Zorian Clayton is Curator of Prints at the Victoria & Albert Museum, specializing in posters
and paper ephemera. He is cochair of the museum’s LGBTQ Working Group and has curated
special events and research projects on queer artists in the collections. Since 2016, he has worked
jointly as a programmer for the BFI Flare Festival, the largest LGBTQ+ film festival in Europe.
Previously, Clayton had a wide-ranging career researching and editing for the BBC and
producing independent documentary films for French television. He is a board member of
TransCreative, a Manchester arts company which aims to inspire and advocate for transgender
people to write, direct, and star in their own stories in theater, film, and the visual arts.

Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at
Carleton University in Ottawa. Previously, she served as Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial
Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of LGBTQ Stu-
dies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass
Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and
Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). Cvetkovich
coedited (with Ann Pellegrini) “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist
Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010). She has
been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Her current
writing projects focus on the state of LGBTQ+ archives and the creative use of them by artists to
produce counter-archives and interventions in public history.

Amanda K. Figueroa is a PhD candidate at Harvard University and a graduate of Mary Baldwin
College and the George Washington University. Her research focuses on Latina art and activism at
the US-Mexico border. She also works with museums to attract underrepresented audiences
through curatorial and exhibition practices. Figueroa’s dissertation focuses on contemporary art by
Chicana and Latina artists that represents trauma related to gender-motivated violence, or feminici-
dio. By examining how trauma is represented and communicated to viewers through space, the
project excavates a Chicana feminist practice of museology and exhibition design.

Stuart Frost is Head of Interpretation and Volunteers at the British Museum. Prior to
commencing his current role in November 2009, he spent almost eight years as part of the
Interpretation Team at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He began his museum
career in 1998 at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist, and writer

from Galiano Island, British Columbia, of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. Usher
completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University. Her thesis, “more than just flesh:
the arts as resistance and sexual empowerment,” focused on how the arts may be used as a
tool to engage Indigenous youth in discussions of health and sexuality, drawing
xii List of contributors

predominantly on the work of Qaggiavuut!, an Arctic performing arts group, for her case
study. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s Uni-
versity and has been awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship
for her research-creation work around urban Indigenous experiences and activations of
public spaces through community-based gestures both little and big. She was awarded the
2018 Canadian Art Writing Prize and has been lucky to develop her installation-based artistic
practice in collaboration with filmmaker Asinnajaq.

Colline Horstink was born as Nico in a middle class Rotterdam family. Having grown up
as a boy, he became a precision engineer, filling diverse social and technical jobs. Creativity
and inventive solutions characterize his professional life. Strong social involvement must also
be mentioned. Since he turned fifty, the author has given the transgender side of their per-
sonality a more prominent place; psychological assistance has led to a better integration of
masculine and feminine traits. Horstink’s marriage has survived this difficult process. Nowa-
days Colline and Nico live in harmony. Nico remains a dedicated husband, father, and
grandfather. Colline plays her role in the transgender community, giving information at
schools and occasionally as a living book in a human library. She has served as one of the
hosts for Transgenders Amsterdam events for several years. In 2015, she played a significant
role in the Transmission exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum.

Dawn Hoskin is a Consultant Curator with the National Trust and a member of their
LGBTQ Steering Group. She previously worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A)
for almost a decade, within a variety of curatorial roles and collecting departments. She was
Assistant Curator for the major redevelopment of the V&A’s Europe 1600–1815 Galleries
and cochair of the V&A’s LGBTQ Working Group for six years. Hoskin has a Masters in
Art, Museum, and Gallery Studies from Newcastle University and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art.
She is particularly enthusiastic about highlighting issues of gender, sexuality, and identity;
encouraging greater diversity within cultural institutions; working collaboratively; and sup-
porting social justice movements. Her wide-ranging research interests include the depiction
of women cyclists in late nineteenth-century posters; the gendering of childhood; early
balloon flight; singeries; and the production of Windsor chairs.

Hayden Hunt is the former Assistant Curator of Heather James Fine Art based in Palm Desert,
California. He has curated solo exhibitions of work by Alexander Calder, Norman Rockwell,
and Wojciech Fangor, as well as several themed group exhibitions. He is currently pursuing his
Master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Museum and Exhibition Studies.

Åsa Johannesson is a London-based fine artist and researcher working with photography.
Johannesson is a Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton and is currently com-
pleting a PhD at the Royal College of Art, provisionally titled Material-ontology: Reconsidering the
Measure of Queer in Photography. Johannesson’s work examines the relationship between photo-
graphy and the notions difference and queer, predominantly through the lens of nonconforming
gender. Developing from her own art practice, and supported by nondialectical theories,
Johannesson’s research presents a new logic to a queering photography. Recent exhibitions
include Looking Out, Looking in at MOCA London, The White Gaze at Växjö Konsthall 2015,
and The Boy & The Twins at GIBCA Göteborg Biennale Extended 2013.
 List of contributors xiii

Özge Kelekçi is currently enrolled in the PhD program in the Philosophy Department at
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She acquired her Bachelor’s degree
from Boğaziçi University Philosophy Department, Istanbul, Turkey, and obtained her
Master’s degree from the same department with a thesis titled “The Disclosure of Petrified
Unrest: The Gezi Protests from the Perspectives of Jean-Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin.”
Her focus is on the new subjectivities; bioethics; posthumanity and transhumanity; social/
political philosophy; philosophy of death; and queer/feminist philosophy. She also resear-
ches and studies memorialization at difficult spaces; gender and phenomenology; and new
materialism.

Clair Le Couteur (1982) is a nonbinary research artist and folk singer writing up their
PhD – “Mislabelling and the Fictive Museum” – at the RCA in London. Clair makes
transmedia assemblages, entangling fact and fiction, research and creation, tradition and
contemporaneity. Recent projects include: Transportation Blues (2016), live-looped folksong
performance at the Horse Hospital; Roots Between the Tides (2016), a photo-network
installation at Warrington Museum; and Reading Trans (2017) and The Trans Tipping Point
(2017), postgraduate workshop series for Goldsmiths and Open School East. Clair is one
half of the performance research project LUNATRAKTORS, which released the debut
“This is Broken Folk” on vinyl in Spring 2019.

Amy K. Levin has edited Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants in Museums and
Archives (2017); Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s
Changing Communities (second edition 2017, coedited with Joshua Adair; first edition, 2009);
and Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader (2010). Levin served as Director of
Women’s Studies, Coordinator of Museum Studies, and Chair of English at Northern Illinois
University for twenty-one years before beginning a new career as an independent scholar in
2016. Most recently, Levin was a visiting professor in Public History at the University of
Amsterdam in fall 2017.

Olle Lundin is a cultural producer, communication designer, and curator embedded within
educational, academic, and artistic practices. Lundin specializes in how social theory can be
used to alter the approach to design. His projects materialize theory and question norms
within the design field as well as in society at large. In an attempt to give alternative forms to
debate, he explores political and societal topics with diverse media such as experience design,
graphic design, performance, and radio. While working as a freelancer on various projects, he
is currently coordinating the queer practices at the Van Abbemuseum as well as moderating
debates and teaching at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Brenda Malone is a military and social historian and curator at the National Museum of Ireland.
Particular areas of interest include the development of the idea of “nation” and how this is col-
lected and portrayed in the museum’s historical, military, Irish independence, and Irish folklife
collections and their histories. She has curated many exhibitions in history and military history
and has collected widely in the area of contemporary social history and difficult histories. She is
also the author of The Cricket Bat that Died for Ireland, a blog that tells the often complex and
contentious stories behind historical artifacts collected by the museum.
xiv List of contributors

Craig Middleton is Curator at National Museum of Australia. He is interested in political

histories in museums, community engagement as museological practice, curatorial activism,
and LGBTQI+ issues and museums. He is coauthor (with Nikki Sullivan) of Queering the
Museum (Routledge, 2019), and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Irina D. Mihalache is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies in the Faculty of Informa-

tion at the University of Toronto. Mihalache studies what people eat in museums, a topic
which opens up several research avenues. First, her research problematizes the absence of
the museum restaurant in museum studies literature. Second, focusing on the archives
of the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and the Seattle Art Museum, she examines the role
of women’s committees in transforming museums into relevant social spaces through
culinary programming. Finally, Mihalache’s work is concerned with the inequalities evident
in the history of producing culinary knowledge and culture, paying particular attention to
migrant food cultures in relation to the formation of a mainstream Canadian cuisine.
Together with Nina Levent, Mihalache edited Food and Museums (2016). She has pub-
lished articles in various journals, including Museum and Society; Food, Culture & Society;
Gastronomica; and Library Trends.

Daniel Neugebauer studied literature, art education, and English in Bielefeld, Germany. He
received additional training in marketing, museum management, and cultural geragogy. Neu-
gebauer worked at Kunsthalle Bielefeld from 2006–2012. From 2012 to 2018, he served as head
of marketing, media, and fundraising at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Neugebauer was also temporary marketing coordinator for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and
Athens, Greece. Since April 2018, he has headed the Department for Cultural Education and
Communication at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. His work focuses on inclu-
sion, with particular emphases on older populations and young adults. He actively explores the
possibilities for combining education and communication in a transnational context.

Tuan Nguyen is a museum and archive researcher and professional driven to enabling
diverse communities to access empowering cultural experiences. His PhD thesis, Queering
Australian Museums: Management, Collections, Exhibitions, and Connections (University of
Sydney, 2018) considers barriers and enablers of further LGBTQ+ inclusion in Australian
museums. It contributes new case studies to community-oriented museum studies and the
emerging field of queer museology. In addition, he has published on topics including med-
iating conflict surrounding queer content in museum exhibitions (Historic Environment, 2016),
comparing the management of AIDS quilts in public versus community-based organizations
(Museum & Society 2018), and on the potential benefits of pop-up museums over permanent
organizations (present volume). You can follow his work at www.vutuannguyen.com.

Catherine O’Donnell is a museum and gallery practitioner based in Dublin. Formerly the
Programme Manager at the People’s History Museum in Manchester (UK), she conceived
and managed Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights. She has worked on
projects spanning education, exhibitions, and public programming. O’Donnell also has
expertise in participatory methodologies, coproduction, and working with challenging and
contested history. She is passionate about community engagement and collaborating with
people to enable them to tell their stories. An Associate of the Museums Association,
 List of contributors xv

O’Donnell holds an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of
Manchester, and a BA in English Literature and Art History from Newcastle University.

Manon S. Parry, PhD, is Professor of the History of Medicine at Free University, Amster-
dam, and Senior Lecturer in Public History at the University of Amsterdam. She has curated
gallery and online exhibitions on a wide range of topics, including global health and human
rights, disability in the American Civil War, and medicinal and recreational drug use. Traveling
versions of her exhibitions have visited more than three hundred venues in Argentina, Canada,
Germany, Guam, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She is the author of
Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media (2013), on the birth control move-
ment’s use of mass media in the USA and around the world. Her current research project is
“Human Curiosities: Expanding the Social Relevance of Medical Museums,” funded by a VENI
grant of €315,000 from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Special
Collections/University of Amsterdam.

Michael Petry studied at Rice University, Houston, and has a DA degree from Middlesex
University. Petry, currently director of MOCA London, cofounded the Museum of Instal-
lation and was Curator of the Royal Academy Schools Gallery. Petry coedited Installation Art
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994) and Installation Art in the New Millennium (Thames &
Hudson, 2003). His monographs include Hidden Histories: 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers
in The Visual Arts (Artmedia Press, 2004) and The WORD is Art (Thames & Hudson, 2018).
Petry’s book, The Art of Not Making: The New Artist Artisan Relationship (Thames & Hudson,
2011), was accompanied by a touring exhibition he curated, as was Nature Morte: Con-
temporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition (2016). Petry was the first Artist in Resi-
dence at Sir John Soane’s Museum and had a one-man show, The Touch of the Oracle, at the
Palm Springs Art Museum (2012). Petry’s artistic work has also been shown in museums and
international exhibitions including Frontiers Reimagined at the Venice Biennale (2015).

Anne Rensma is currently completing her MA in Gender Studies at Utrecht University and
serving as an intern at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. She has an undergraduate
degree in French (literature) Studies, and she has previous experience in cultural studies and
journalism. Her academic interests lie in affect theory, storytelling, and decolonial theory.

Hugo Schalkwijk is a public historian specializing in the contemporary history of medicine

and health, as well as in the use of oral history. He graduated from the University of
Amsterdam with an MA in Public History in 2015 and has worked since then as an inde-
pendent researcher on topics within the history of medicine. Previous research projects
include the history of palliative medicine in the Netherlands for ZonMw (the Netherlands
Organization for Health Research and Development) and a history of HIV/AIDS in the
Netherlands. Most recently, he researched untold stories of Dutch HIV/AIDS nurses during
the 1980s and 1990s for the Florence Nightingale Institute in the Netherlands.

Rovel Sequeira is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where

he is also pursuing a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. His research
interests include queer theory and medical humanities, critical race theory, the histories of
modernism and modernization, postcolonial literatures, and global Anglophone studies. He is
xvi List of contributors

currently completing his dissertation on the relationships between the history of colonization
and the trajectories of sexual modernity in India. He has presented papers on the histories of
South Asian queer and transgender politics at colloquia in the USA and India, and he is
working on a project on the connections between activist self-fashioning, communitarian
belonging, and genres such as the autobiography and testimonial.

Matt Smith is an artist and curator. His solo shows have included Flux: Parian Unpacked at the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK) and Queering the Museum at the Birmingham Museum
(UK). In 2016, he was awarded a practice-based PhD at the University of Brighton, funded by
the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Art’s Use of Craft to
Signify LGBT Identities considered practical ways in which craft can explore untold queer his-
tories in museums, galleries, and historic houses. Smith is Professor of Ceramics and Glass at
Konstfack University, Stockholm, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Lei-
cester’s School of Museum Studies. His work is held in the collections of the V&A, where he was
Artist in Residence in 2015; the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and Brighton Museum. It has
been purchased by the Art Fund and the Contemporary Art Society.

Mirjam Sneeuwloper is an educator, program designer, and curator at the Amsterdam

Museum, formerly Amsterdam Historical Museum. Her focus is on effecting social
change through innovative collaborative projects involving museums and communities.
Accessibility and openness are essential characteristics of her work, and she is particularly
committed to building representation and participation in museums by groups that are
not (yet) part of the dominant narrative. Sneeuwloper has been involved in projects
including Holy?! (Biblical Museum), 2005–2011; Voices of Tolerance (Museum Ons’ Lieve
Heer op Solder – Museum of Our Lord in the Attic), 2017; Transmission (on transgender,
Amsterdam Museum), 2015–2016 and 2017; Network LGBTI (Amsterdam Museum),
2017; Sharing Stories – HIV/AIDS and Sharing Stories – Exploring Identity (both Amster-
dam Museum), 2018. Since 2015, she has been on the advisory board of the Dutch
network Queering the Collections.

Nikki Sullivan is a Curator at the Migration Museum in Adelaide, South Australia, and
Honorary Associate Professor, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural
Studies at Macquarie University. She is the author of numerous books, including A Critical
Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2003). She is coauthor (with Craig
Middleton) of the forthcoming Queering the Museum (Routledge, 2019).

Jana Sverdljuk is Associate Professor at the National Library of Norway, curating

archives on contemporary migration to Norway, as well as historical archives on emi-
gration from Norway to the USA. She has written her PhD thesis on gender and eth-
nicity in the media representations of migrants in Norway, engaging with theories of
postcoloniality and intersectionality. Currently, Sverdljuk is a researcher within Digitiza-
tion and Diversity: Potentials and Challenges for Diversity in the Culture and Media
Sector, a project financed by the Research Council of Norway, KULMEDIA. The pur-
pose of the project is to assess the impact of the digitization of cultural industries,
libraries, and museums on diversity. Sverdljuk has also written articles for international
journals and been involved in feminist projects.
 List of contributors xvii

Yvo Manuel Vas Dias is a transman, Buddhist with a Jewish background. Born in
Amsterdam and educated as a social worker, he has also been a case manager and public
relations manager. He set up several transgender networks and was a member of the board of
various LGBT, transgender, Buddhist, and cultural organizations. In 2014, he founded
TransAmsterdam and Amsterdam TransPride, which he leads today. TransAmsterdam is a
transgender organization for art, culture, and lifestyle – it offers a creative outlet by organiz-
ing activities and themed gatherings for and on behalf of transgender individuals. It seeks to
improve public perceptions of transgender people; to increase trans visibility; and to
empower trans individuals. It also provides information and advice related to transgender
subjects. Its goal is to build a bridge between the transgender community and society through
art and culture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted to the authors whose works comprise this collection for their insights and
hard work. They have written carefully considered pieces and responded patiently to our
many queries in a truly collaborative fashion. Thanks to Heidi Lowther, Marc Stratton, and
Katie Wakelin at Routledge for their patience and assistance throughout this process. Justin
Ness of Northern Illinois University served as our graduate student intern from August to
October 2018.
I (Joshua G. Adair) am grateful to Amy K. Levin for our continued editing partnership; I
never stop learning from, and feeling inspired by, you. I would also like to acknowledge the
support of the Murray State University College of Humanities and Fine Arts, which made
my on-site research in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2017 possible. I am grateful to – and thankful
for – my patient partner, Brad Simmons, who serves up support and sanity with a side of
silliness. Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Patricia Adair, for frequently serving as my
complaint hotline and for always encouraging me to press on.
I (Amy K. Levin) am delighted to be collaborating with one of my favorite former stu-
dents. I thank Eric Crane for his support and willingness to travel to the Netherlands with
me while I conducted research for this book. My mother, Barbara Saposs Levin, continues to
inspire me with her curiosity about art and museums as well as her irrepressible joie de vivre. I
draw inspiration and hope for the future from my grandchildren, Caleb and Lizzy, and from
the knowledge that there is at least one more to come!
Deserving of mention are all the gay, lesbian, intersex, straight, cisgender, trans, two
spirit, nonbinary, queer, and otherwise identified artists, museum workers, and community
members dedicated to gender inclusion and visibility. Their activism makes the world more
welcoming in the face of powerful efforts to police and suppress alterity. We value their
unruliness, their delight in deviance, and their defiance. This book is dedicated to them.
PART I
Frameworks
Joshua G. Adair

In the world of scholarship – museum-related or otherwise – there is no last word, thank-

fully. We can only hope to offer the latest word, because the ways we conduct museum
work, and our frameworks for theorizing those practices, grow and change, perennially
adapting to issues and perspectives not previously considered – or perhaps even recognized –
as well as redressing those that went unaddressed for myriad reasons. We thinkers and prac-
titioners and our GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) spaces are forever works
in progress – if we are serious about ourselves and our work, that is.
The last word in this collection’s title – activism – is a word my coeditor and I insisted
appear prominently since it is the work of this volume. In many ways, we argue, it should
always be the last word where museums are concerned since it is a word without rest – one
which insists upon perpetual improvement and an engagement that forecloses finality. It
proudly announces that we have problems to fix and that no solution, however radical, is
likely to settle an issue permanently. Instead, we must remain active, alert, and open to a way
of thinking and working that does not clamor for conclusion.
Engaging effectively in activist practice demands specific sensibilities; it welcomes dissent,
difference, and disruption. As scholars and practitioners, we must also admit that in many
ways we have been getting it wrong – and that undoubtedly we will unintentionally repeat
those mistakes and/or invent new ones in attempting to chart improved paths and possibi-
lities. It helps to have a healthy sense of humility, and cultivating a little campiness does not
hurt either. Above all, honesty and a willingness to engage multiple perspectives must form
the framework for creating museums that do not exist in a state of inertia, but that enliven,
enrich, and energize.
Jack Halberstam, in his 2011 monograph The Queer Art of Failure, offers insight that is
useful here, especially when considering the ways we have failed to create institutions capable
of achieving such goals. He argues,

What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to
escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development
with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable
2 Joshua G. Adair

adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs
the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And
while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as dis-
appointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these
negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.
(Halberstam 2011, 3)

If we scholars and practitioners were not failing – at least on some, if not many, levels – there
would be no need for this collection. Rather than feeling defeated, however, we all must
find opportunities for new possibilities in failure – even if those too are ultimately rejected –
and a path forward.
As Halberstam notes, “In some sense we have to untrain ourselves so that we can read the
struggles and debates back into questions that seem settled and resolved” (2011, 11). This
“Frameworks” section proposes to do just that: highlight what is not working and confront
our failures forcefully. Halberstam’s negative approach reveals new possibilities by focusing
less upon positive outcomes and glowing feedback, and narrowing in upon problems, aporia,
and even pain. It is in these places – and states of being – that we may begin to postulate and
practice as we prime ourselves to fail better. Of the many conditions necessary to arrive at
that end, we must focus upon the activist tactics of resistance, speaking truth to power, and
perhaps most importantly, persistence.
Amy K. Levin, my coeditor, demonstrates such persistence when introducing this collec-
tion using those tactics and – to illustrate my observations about last and latest words –
hearkens back to the 2010 collection Gender, Sexuality, and Museums (GSM). When I worked
on that collection as an editorial assistant and a new PhD, I felt certain we were compiling a
definitive volume that would establish the last word on many of the subjects addressed
therein. Thankfully, I could not have been more wrong. While GSM has become a foun-
dational text in many ways, it has also opened the sluice gates to a torrent of new words,
ideas – and most importantly – conversations. Ten years later, the book continues to be used
frequently, but we both recognize the need to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about
how museums engage gender, gender identity, sex, and sexuality through activism.
Rather than resting on laurels or the reputation of that original collection, Levin’s intro-
duction draws us into a world that feels – and indeed is – remarkably different from the one
in which we lived a decade ago. Many institutions – large and small, permanent and tem-
porary – have made strides to improve queer visibility and gender parity. Not all have suc-
ceeded and many have not gone far enough. Levin reminds us, along with the other authors
in this section, that certain kinds of people and practices continue to garner favor over others.
Many stories remain silenced; visitors still struggle to see themselves in certain institutions.
Worse still, many minority individuals of all sorts never step foot inside such places because
their alienation has continued too long, and they fear change simply is not possible.
Focusing upon the intricacies and ethics of representation, Amanda K. Figueroa explores
the ways in which a Chicana feminist museology, underpinned by the theories and insights
of the late Gloria Anzaldúa, may help all parties connected to museums – practitioners,
scholars, visitors – learn to accept and even enjoy feeling uncomfortable, uncertain, and
indefinite. Figueroa traverses fascinating terrain as she draws upon Anzaldúa’s concepts
regarding border/liminal spaces, fusing them with the physicality of museums and their role
in producing identity through certain curatorial practices. Such practices, she contends with
 Frameworks 3

reference to Anzaldúa, often have a destabilizing effect that leaves visitors questioning who
constructs and solidifies identity, as each party plays a role in creation and confusion.
Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton also offer a new framework for thinking about inclusion.
They focus specifically upon the ethics of the ideal of inclusivity, highlighting the universalizing
tactics frequently employed in official conversations about – and policies pertaining to – the
representation of queer people in exhibits of all sorts. More timely than ever, their focus
helps readers to consider the contradictions and conflicts inherent in negotiating the com-
plexities of representation, authenticity, and the politics of policy. Too often, they conclude,
difference is erased in favor of palatability and so-called progressiveness.
Rather than offering definitive pronouncements – last words, if you will – Levin, Fig-
ueroa, and Sullivan and Middleton present possibilities. Each chapter raises pivotal questions
and then sets about modeling possibilities without ever claiming to have arrived at a sole
solution. They exist in determined indeterminacy, gesturing toward productive possibilities
underpinned by heavy-hitting scholarship and practice. Each charts not only the challenges
we face, but forms a framework that opens out and suggests that the real solution we seek
succeeds only when we consider a stopping point as a pivot rather than a terminus.

References
Halberstam, J. Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1
INTRODUCTION
Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism

Amy K. Levin

A chain of shops named Sissy Boy. A bus shelter advertisement depicting an androgynous black
woman in a menswear-inspired suit with a stiletto heel over the leg of a nude man, tagged
#notdressingmen. A male mannequin wearing a “dog suit,” a pleather mask with muzzle and
small ears; chains; and tiny shorts. The talented transgender woman who sells the best quiche in
the market on Saturday. A prime minister who attacks his far-right opponent with the epithet “a
woman who makes herself as unattractive as possible” (“Wilders is ‘woman,’” 2017). The red
light window down the block featuring a woman with an Eastern European name. Markers of
gender and sexuality surround me in Amsterdam during the fall of 2017.1
My aim here is not to reify stereotypes of the nation as a haven for sexual permissiveness. Issues
related to gender and sexuality arise across the globe, and activists often respond. The #metoo
campaign against sexual harassment has been prominent in Europe and the USA, and Donald
Trump’s ill-chosen remarks about Pocahontas on November 27, 2017,2 reveal the intersections
of racism and sexism within the US right. In focusing primarily on the Netherlands, with a brief
detour to an exhibition in the UK, I intend to survey the ways in which certain museums
represent gender, sexuality, and more generally, diversity at a particular moment in time, in order
to introduce topics discussed in this book.
In broader terms, Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is designed to supplement the 2010
collection, Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader by including more recent content
and filling gaps. Since the publication of the latter, additional books on its topics have appeared,
and museum exhibitions have rendered diverse genders and sexualities more visible. While
individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ or nonbinary have been largely invisible in museums,
women have sometimes been too visible, as odalisques or nudes. Fortunately, museum and gal-
lery displays have pursued new avenues in representing women as well as feminist and queer
theory, which will be discussed in this text.
With its activist emphasis, this volume complements existing books. It is not our intent to
survey all of these, but a few deserve mention. Kate Hill’s Women and Museums, 1850–1914:
Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (2016) examines women’s roles as museum workers,
object donors, visitors, and patrons. A key point is that “Museums and galleries both repre-
sented patriarchal values to women visitors [and women in other relations to the institutions],
6 Amy K. Levin

and offered them spaces in which to challenge those values” (119). This argument undergirds
Mihalache’s chapter in this collection, but it also applies to the efforts of queer visitors, artists,
and museum staff. Astute readers will note that strategies employed by cisgender straight
women to influence exhibitionary institutions have been adopted by individuals who identify
as LGBTQ+. These include volunteering to assist staff with relevant projects and joining
advisory groups, like the one described in our chapter on the Amsterdam Museum. Similarly,
Malin Hayden and Jessika Skrubbe’s chapters in their edited collection, Feminism is Still Our
Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices (2010), complement the discussion
of catalogue copy in this introduction and in Hayden Hunt’s chapter. Catalogues provide an
extended view of exhibitions as well as information on how curators and other experts have
thought about them. Most recently, Jenna Ashton’s massive two-volume collection, Feminism
and Museums (2017, 2018), offers case studies from around the world. It focuses primarily on
women-born-as-women and feminism without consistently exploring alterity in terms of
gender, sexuality, and queerness. Gender is generally understood as binary, and neither volume
includes extensive material on transgender.
Other works engage in contemporary dialogues about sex, gender, and sexuality as they relate
to exhibitionary institutions. Jennifer Tyburczy’s Sex Museums (2016) begins with a description of
how museums have participated in policing sex and sexuality. She surveys sexual displays, using
the example of the Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art to explain the linkage of sex and violence.
Moving forward to exhibitions such as Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington,
DC, as well as a sex museum in Mexico, she demonstrates how the gallery may become a space
in which national politics and attitudes toward sex and sexuality are performed. Articles in our
book, such as Rovel Sequeira’s, draw similar connections. Tyburczy’s work is unusual in that it
deals with pornography as well as sex, gender, and sexuality in museums. Institutions such as the
British Museum and the Museum of Sex in New York have exhibited sexually explicit Japanese
shunga (see Stuart Frost’s chapter in this book); however, Western pornography generally remains
uninterrogated in exhibitionary institutions. Linley Sambourne House in London treats the
owner’s pornographic photographs as art even as it presents them way at the top of the house.
The Sex Museum in Amsterdam displays erotica and sex toys with little analysis. This institution’s
primary purpose appears to be to titillate tourists rather than to educate. This lack of critical
examination of museums and pornography is reflected in the limited amount of writing on the
subject, although some exhibitions have been sex-positive and/or educate about sex.
The literature on LGBTQ+ themes is mixed. Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic
Sites is a 2015 text by Susan Ferentinos, who has worked with the US National Park Service on
its guidelines for LGBTQ+ inclusion. A lengthy historical section allows for only limited dis-
cussion of museums and their relationship to individuals who identify as LGBTQ+. The author
often renders her subjects as others: she refers to them as possessing “variant” or “alternative”
sexualities. As we shall see, museums continue to take this approach as well.
In 2017, Richard Sandell published Museums, Moralities and Human Rights; despite the title,
this book is largely about museums and representations of LGBTQ+ lives, an issue that Sandell
perceives as directly connected to promoting human rights. The chapter on Alice Austen
House in New York is especially valuable in its analysis of debates surrounding the creation of a
historic house museum around the life of a lesbian woman. Moreover, while texts described
above limit their discussion of the T in LGBTQ+, the chapter titled “The Transgender
Tipping Point” introduces Sandell’s work with the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art
(GoMA) and the Scottish Transgender Alliance as an avenue into a discussion of strategies
 Introduction 7

for exhibiting work related to transgender individuals in a respectful and appropriate

manner. Sandell’s monograph focuses primarily on the USA and UK3 but was one of our
inspirations in seeking chapters on transgender and nonbinary artists and exhibitions. This
book is critically important for the equivalence it draws between museums’ diversity efforts
and human rights work, a theme that underlies this collection as well, and is especially
evident in the chapter by Kelekçi and Akbaş.
Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton’s Queering the Museum also takes a theoretical
approach. The authors apply queer theory to the museum as a socially constructed system.
They use this conceptual base to argue that curatorship remains implicitly heteronormative;
even when museums attempt to be more inclusive, they fail because of the overwhelming
presence of traditional structures and assumptions. The coauthored monograph prepares for
their chapter in this book, as does Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visi-
bility, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric Stanley, and Johanna Burton (2017). This volume
incorporates theoretical discussions related to the visibility (or lack thereof) of trans people in
visual culture. It also includes chapters on black trans men and women as well as the Museum
of Transgender Hirstory and Art, topics we hoped to address; however, prospective authors
ultimately found themselves unable to contribute.
These books have contributed to scholarly discourse about museums and gender in ways that
deserve notice; another work has been important to our understanding of the museum as a site
for challenging (its own and other) authorities. Kylie Message’s 2017 monograph, The Disobedient
Museum: Writing at the Edge made us more conscious of the ways in which writing about
museums constitutes activist practice. Message describes her book as “an attempt to motivate
disciplinary thinking/museum studies anew, to reimagine writing (about museums) as an activ-
ity/place where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced, and to
theorize this process as a form of protest against disciplinary stagnation” (36). Her goal “is a focus
on the ways that new forms, genres, sites, and strategies for navigating situations of over-
whelming incoherence and precariousness can also create new sites of action” (23). Several of our
chapters engage with genres and forms that are not common in museum studies theory, includ-
ing interviews, because they facilitate the inclusion of marginalized voices. Other authors, such as
Parry and Schalkwijk or Georgeson-Usher, “navigate” situations where old rules no longer apply
(if they ever did). Their writing enacts protest and resistance as they seek to promote human
rights. We prefer the term unruly (and unruliness) to Message’s disobedient because it refers to the
rules, written and unwritten, that are necessary to instigate protest. The term can also signify
either the quality of a person/situation or the process of challenging the norm. Message argues
that museum writing “is silent about the methodological choices made” (10), drawing on other
fields for its processes. However, many of our authors are explicit about their methodologies and
those in exhibits they analyze. When these contributors mix methods, their selections are unruly
in a way that is generative and exciting.
The changes and disruptions that have occurred in the museum world in the past decade –
as well as those that have not – are best understood when contextualized. As a result, this
introduction includes a snapshot of relevant museum exhibitions in fall 2017 in Amsterdam
and London. Some of these exhibitions have succeeded in solving common difficulties;
others have major flaws, but we can learn from them. This overview offers a base for
thinking about exhibitions and practices described in this volume, as well as the extent to
which museums’ representations of gender and sexuality may contribute to their human
rights activism, although these representations remain grounded in (often false) essentialist
8 Amy K. Levin

binaries, such as male/female; transgender/cisgender; homosexual/heterosexual. I will also

pay attention to intersections of race, ethnicity, social class, citizenship, and other variables
with gender and sexuality.
A prime example of these intersections is Ceylon, an exhibition of photographs by Lionel
Wendt at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. The exhibition draws attention to a Modernist photo-
grapher from the former Dutch colony. While Wendt is not well known in the West, he is
lionized in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), not only for his own art but also for his mentorship of
local artists in the 1930s and 1940s, and especially for his involvement in the ’43 group. A cultural
center named after Wendt sits on the site of the house he built on a former cinnamon plantation
in an elite neighborhood. Of Dutch and Asian descent, Wendt was ahead of his time in his open
homosexuality and photographs of young men, whom he depicted in untitled portraits that may
have protected his subjects’ anonymity. His subjects also included females, beaches, and fellow
artists. Of interest to us in setting a scene for this volume are the ways in which the exhibition
and texts about Wendt (see, for instance, Fonseka 2017) celebrate the artist and his sexuality
without critically analyzing interrelations of class, colonialism, and racial privilege in his works.
Stephan Sanders suggests cavalierly in the catalogue that “The island did, however, always
have something of a reputation in the emerging homosexual and artistic circles, both because
of its stunning landscapes and its boys and men,” adding that the law concerning sexual
“offences was less stringently enforced” than in the UK, particularly for “expats” (2017, 200).
Sanders equates local men with the landscape, objectifying them and putting them down
with the word boys, so often used to denigrate nonwhite males (in contrast, people of Eur-
opean descent are called expats rather than colonizers). For Sanders, Wendt’s photographs
provide a venue for enjoying the bodies of others: “photos of naked, delicate, rising young
men are not about homosexuality but about an aspiration that can probably only be visua-
lized by someone who is a homosexual himself: to photograph boys’ and men’s bodies in
such a way the tangibility of their skin, the interplay of lines on their shoulders, legs and bare
backs would reach beyond that one youth, beyond the perfectly framed face with a turban –
that they would capture the modern” (206). As described, it is hard to believe the assertion
that the photographs are “not about homosexuality,” although Wendt’s emphasis on line and
shadow is indeed modern. The exhibition mirrors these attitudes. The power imbalance is
palpable when one gazes at Wendt’s photographs of local men; the potential social con-
sequences for the models had to be different than for Wendt, who was not only wealthy but
the son of a judge charged with enforcing colonial law on the island.
Wendt rendered his subjects other, presenting laborers as picturesque. An introductory panel
notes: “In a time and place in which homosexuality was simply not accepted, he had men and boys
pose for him in the landscape or in his studio. The skimpy traditional Ceylonese loincloths and the
academic poses that Wendt gave his models allowed him to express his homosexuality under the
guise of art and ethnography. . . . There is no question of exoticism; Wendt had a deep and gen-
uine interest in the country.” It is significant that, for the most part, Wendt did not photograph
men of European descent in the nude, against tropical backgrounds, or in suggestive poses, muscles
rippling as they used tools and equipment. The backdrops – palms, beaches, rocks – belie the
insistence that Wendt never rendered his subjects as exotic or primitive, when he was a product of
a privileged class and race, able to study in the Netherlands. Moreover, in the catalogue, Shanay
Jhaveri questions Wendt’s intent, “which is not ethnographic or meant to be an objective doc-
umentation of an ‘other’ non-western culture, but rather a group of images made by a photo-
grapher that are reflective of his own interests and personal inclinations, and illustrative of the
 Introduction 9

multifarious references and cultural contexts he was navigating” (2017, 187). Jhaveri argues that in
images of workers, “labour [is] bestowed a grandeur, beauty and dignity” (187). Only after nine
pages does he introduce Wendt’s sexuality. Jhaveri seems embarrassed by it, asserting “the photo-
graphs are not vulgar, nor do they generally picture full frontal nudity” (188). He then moves on to
discuss Wendt’s uncertain position as a member of the island’s wealthy class but also of mixed race
and to suggest that Wendt was ambivalent about his own sexuality.4
The Wendt exhibition and accompanying catalogue illustrate trends discussed in this book, in
addition to the intersections of sexuality with race, colonialism, and class. One of them, apparent
in Georgeson-Usher’s chapter, is the use and abuse of Indigenous bodies on display to satisfy
Western desires and reassert Western rule. Another, explored in Petry’s chapter, is the use of
photographic portraiture to reveal or obscure gender difference. Both trends are related to
Mulvey’s notion of scopophilia and the fetishistic gaze (1975). As we shall see, museum texts
(panels, signs, labels, and catalogues in print and digital formats) serve as lenses for audiences,
reproducing and magnifying mainstream attitudes toward nonbinary gender and sexuality,
policing and disciplining unruly bodies. When those who have been objectified as subjects of
ethnography or aesthetic criticism have an opportunity to voice their own positions in
exhibitions, the power imbalances begin to shift.
Unfortunately, binaries are persistent, as beloved and intractable as our most glaring per-
sonal faults. An insistence on sexual or gender binaries continues to underlie much museum
work; this is particularly evident when exhibitions for mainstream audiences evoke gender
stereotypes. The Cool Japan exhibition in the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden in 2017
(reappearing at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum in 2018) exemplifies these trends. At the
Volkenkunde, an ethnographic or anthropological institution, the exhibition drew connec-
tions between historical and contemporary Japanese popular culture, for instance, showing
the roots of manga in narrative screens. The exhibition sought to create a hip vibe in order to
attract a young audience: this was especially obvious in the first room, which featured a
rotating scarlet stage in front of a screen showing graphic characters. On the stage were icons
of Japanese popular culture, from Mario Karts to monsters. The remainder of the exhibition
included a timeline as well as sections depicting characters from mass media; themes including
fashion; and genres, such as video games. The displays spread across two floors and into back
galleries; presumably, they were popular, as the exhibition was extended.
Most notable was the exhibition’s reliance on binary gender constructions and stereotypes
about women, even though Japanese popular culture outside the museum offers a more complex
picture. There was little attempt to provide critical context. Women were depicted either as
cute, desexualized schoolgirls, as in Hello Kitty, sporting brightly colored fashions and singing
perky lyrics, or as jealous demons wreaking punishment on men. A third set of female images
presented women as superheroes, such as Sailor Moon. The labels implied that these recent
iterations were outgrowths of the stereotypes of women as demons. These extremes reflect the
ways in which females are represented in Japanese popular culture; however, there was no ana-
lysis of how women are not permitted to appear as “normal” adults. A panel on Kawaii leads with
a question that suggests some analysis, but in fact remains studiously neutral:

Kawaii means cute – or does it?

Comical fantasy creatures from Nintendo games, girls with huge eyes: “cute” or kawaii is
one of the most characteristic features of Japanese popular culture. But kawaii means more
than just “cute.” It also denotes immaturity, helplessness and a gentle nature.
10 Amy K. Levin

The kawaii culture arose as a protest among girls rebelling against the pressure to grow
up, work hard and conform to the strict demands of society. Later, the popularity of
kawaii brought it great commercial success. Kawaii icons like Hello Kitty gross huge
profits in Japan and the rest of the world.

The author of the panel balances two negatives, “immaturity” and “helplessness,” with a
positive, “a gentle nature.” No judgment is rendered on the protest. The passive voice
describes the “commercial success” of kawaii, which begs the question of how this popularity
arose (were girls choosing it freely? Did they feel disciplined?). In the end, a degrading image
of girls is reduced to profit.5 Even in the historical section, female samurai Tomoe Gozen is
described as following her lover into battle, minimizing her agency. Her unruliness is con-
trolled, literally framed. A teenage girl walking through might wonder what (if any) role
models would be available to her that were not distorted extremes.
Cool Japan was also uncool about homosexuality and transgender. Sailor Moon was inclu-
ded, but there was no mention of a homosexual theme in early episodes of the show. The
curators further missed the opportunity to mention that Edo period artists such as Hokusai
and Hiroshige depicted onnagata (male youth dressed as women who were objects of male
and female desire) and wakashu (androgynous male youth sometimes described as inhabiting a
third gender; Fujino 2016). In a recreated manga library, texts were separated into two sec-
tions, one identified as male (including a shelf titled Harem) and a smaller one identified as
female. Queer manga were shelved in a very small area within the female section and labeled
Gender Bender. 6
The Cool Japan exhibit reified reductive tropes related to gender in Japanese popular
culture. The distortions reflected gender politics, but they also demonstrated one of the
most dangerous aspects of hiding or twisting the range of nonbinary gender identities and
sexualities: in these institutions that are among the most trusted by the public (American
Alliance of Museums 2018; Kendall 2013), incorrect and even malicious views are
accepted by the public. This topic continues to arise for authors in this collection, many
of whom argue that incorrect or missing information may lead to the perpetration of
human rights violations.
When curators attempt to represent a full range of sexualities, and, to a lesser extent,
genders, they confront different problems. Institutions face the question of how to treat the
stories of individuals who were closeted in their lifetimes and whom we now know were queer,
gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans. As strongly as some argue that it is a distortion of the historical
record to claim them for the queer community, others (including Sandell in Museums, Moralities
and Human Rights 2017) insist on the importance of speaking the truth as we know it, even if
terms we use did not exist when the individuals were alive. Hoskin and Clayton discuss this issue
in the context of their work at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Clare Barlow,
curator of Queer British Art at Tate Britain in London, retained ambiguity. Even though
artists were gathered under the mantle of queerness through the 2017 exhibition’s title, the
wall texts and catalogue cast doubt on artists’ sexuality through the passive voice, used as
described in the section on Wendt above; a predilection for indefinite terms, such as perhaps;
a reminder of attitudinal shifts which distances the artist in time; or an appeal to unnamed
agents or authorities.
Below are examples from the catalogue (Barlow 2017).7 Bracketed comments draw
attention to omissions, resisting her readings.
 Introduction 11

Little is known [by?] about Meteyard’s sexuality other than the fact that he was married,
but the sensuous and ambiguous nature of this painting allows for queer readings [by?
Agents unclear].
(36)

Given the homoerotic pleasures [whose? This recalls the comment about the “stunning”
men in Wendt’s photographs] of viewing Leighton’s figure, it is perhaps telling that it
was executed at the very moment when Michelangelo’s own sexuality was beginning to
be re-evaluated.
(39)

some modern scholars [which?] have noted that these poses combine in ways that are open
to homoerotic interpretation [avoiding actually calling them homoerotic] … the homo-
erotic possibilities of the composition may not have been viewed as such by the artist or
original audience [distancing in time; assigning authority to others].
(40)

Some of these statements appeared in condensed form in the exhibition itself. An example was
a plaque accompanying Dora Carrington’s Female Figure Lying on Her Back (1912): “It may be
tempting to read a lesbian sensibility into this languid image, although at this stage in her life,
desire seems to have made Carrington uncomfortable.” Such awkwardness did serve as a
reminder of the precariousness of LGBTQ+ lives, giving the entire show an aura of “now you
see it, now you don’t.” These locutions also highlighted the contortions often necessary for those
presenting queer-themed exhibitions, because they fear legal consequences, loss of funding, or
criticism from mainstream audiences. In particular, the use of passive voice or unidentified
authorities may hide misogyny and/or homophobia. Consider for a moment if a straight cis-
gender woman were described similarly, and the imbalances become sharper:

She lived when social attitudes regarding gender and sexuality were shifting; we have to
take at face value that she described herself as a heterosexual as the term was defined
then [by whom? Lack of agency].
Until she married a male, she was commonly assumed [by? Passive] to be homosexual.
Some former colleagues [vague reference?] suggested that this involvement might have
served to cloak her interest in men.
Her feminine style of dress cannot be taken as evidence that she was heterosexual
[passive voice hides agency or authority].

In other words, efforts in the Tate exhibition to describe people as they presented themselves to
the public of their time risk perpetuating silences, absences, and erasures. These tactics often
occur elsewhere; for example, the American Writers Museum in Chicago does not present Walt
Whitman or Willa Cather as queer in its initial timeline. Individual guides at Leighton House in
London are more or less open about the possibility that the artist who owned the home was
homosexual. Such tactics do not necessarily reflect the wishes of those described – were they
alive today, they might choose to have their sexuality out in the open. There is also a double
standard, as museums do not shy away from presenting new(er) knowledge about other topics;
for example, no one would omit the fact that the earth is round from an exhibit on pre-Galilean
12 Amy K. Levin

astronomers because including the information would be historically inaccurate. The Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, portrays the president in a wheelchair, even
though Roosevelt would have preferred to hide that fact. The information is available partly to
illustrate the contributions of individuals with disabilities to American history. Depriving indivi-
duals who identify as gay, lesbian, transgender and/or nonbinary of the same access to history and
role models remains a common and often unquestioned strategy.
Institutions signal ambivalence about exhibits related to gender diversity in other ways as well.
A common and controversial tactic is the temporary exhibition, like the three discussed above. In
the chapter on the Transmission exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum, some community
members describe this practice negatively. They claim that temporary exhibitions suggest that
museums are checking off boxes in a list of identity categories rather than making any kind of
permanent commitment (although in the case of the Tate, the permanent collection reflects
significant investment in artists who identify as LGBTQ+). Yet Tuan Nguyen argues that
pop-up displays related to queer themes also allow flexibility and risk-taking.
Indeed, not all efforts to include diverse genders and sexualities are doomed to fail. This book
includes examples of successful exhibitions and programs. The American Alliance of Museums
(AAM) LGBTQ Alliance has prepared Welcoming Guidelines, together with a glossary. Once
more, the Netherlands provides a case in point – the consistent efforts of the Van Abbemuseum
through its Queering the Collection initiative (analyzed in greater depth in the chapter by Rensma,
Neugebauer, and Lundin), which has become part of the institution’s permanent working prac-
tices. The initiative has included acquisitions; exhibitions; an experimental workspace; a queer
reading group; a queer media club; topic-based queering sessions (for instance, on sports and
fashion); and other creative activities. The curators understand that mainstream audiences may
not be familiar with the current panoply of terms related to sex, gender, and sexuality, so they
asked sociologist Alice Venir and her (now former) student Olle Lundin to develop a glossary for
its website, part of which is cited below. The glossary is open-ended and poses questions or offers
opportunities for readers to suggest changes. It acknowledges debates and adopts a cheeky tone as
if to deflect criticism. Feminism, for example, is interrogated in the 2015 version of the glossary:
“What a scary word! Is it about equal rights, or is it about man-hating, peculiarities of femaleness,
political lesbianism, body hair, religion, abortion, and defeating gender barriers? Whose feminism
is it anyway? Is feminism the feminism of black women? Of non-Western women, of women
wearing a hijab? Is it the feminism of the porn stars and the sex workers? Is feminism trans*
inclusive or is it about motherhood and reproduction? Whose feminism is your feminism” (Venir
and Lundin 2015)? In fall 2018, the glossary was removed from the site, partly because some
found the definitions inaccurate or offensive and partly because its creators recognized the
dynamic nature of queerness (Venir and Lundin 2018). A revised version was posted shortly
thereafter, one that included fewer questions and was less spunky.
Together with the glossary, the Qwearing the Collection tools deserve note. Lundin designed
two items of clothing to help visitors understand what they were viewing. The first is a jacket,
similar to a lab coat, imprinted with images and text related to artists in the permanent exhibi-
tion. A visitor might turn a pocket inside out to find information about Frida Kahlo’s life, or a
sleeve might feature an image queering another artist’s work. A lapel might include a quotation
in which an artist discusses gender and Islam. The coat replaces the increasingly ubiquitous tablet
that allows visitors to click for detailed object information. Lundin also designed a scarf featuring
sections of the glossary so visitors could look up terms without having to access digital media (see
book cover). These scarves, printed on ombré fabric in many colors, are sold in the museum.
 Introduction 13

The intern received payment for his designs, a novel way of funding a graduate student – now he
continues to work with the institution.
According to Lundin, these tactics interrogate the role of embodiment: “Accessing the
information on the garments involves reading text and imagery from one’s own body as well
as the surrounding bodies. . . . This alters the performativity of the exhibition space and
renegotiates the relation between the wearing and the non-wearing visitors” (2018). In
essence, the body wearing Lundin’s items becomes a conduit for communicating museum
content and participates in the exhibition on a deeper level than the bodies of those who
simply gaze. These performative strategies, rich in implications, complement a 2018 project
in which the museum made grants to transgender artists, curators, and writers. Deviant Practice
strived to reappropriate the term deviance and to explore its positive possibilities:

We understand deviance as veering off the entrenched path. For the modern art
museum such as Van Abbemuseum these paths emerged from the West’s understanding
of itself and by inference its relationship to others. Deviance therefore necessarily
involves challenging long-held institutional, racial, geo- and bio-political assumptions.
We understand the prefix “de” in deviance in relation to notions of demodernizing,
decolonizing, deprivileging or decentralizing. . . . We also understand deviance as an
opportunity to reflect on the manner in which we approach our own practices and
protocols: questioning past suppositions, hierarchies and modes of working.
(Van Abbemuseum 2017)

The statement is presented as a methodology for approaching the past and opening up to
greater participation by marginalized populations. From this perspective, we claim this book
as deviant in the best way.
To illustrate how we intend to explore current and past practice with the intent of promoting
deviance and unruliness, we find it necessary, as the Van Abbemuseum did, to provide certain
definitions. Throughout the book, the abbreviation LGBTQ+ signifies the collectivity of les-
bian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals, as they define themselves or as history has found
them to be. Contributor Tuan Nguyen (2018) adds, “LGBTQ+ is a nonexclusive acronym.” The
2015 glossary compiled at the Van Abbe compares this acronym to alternatives:

LGBTQI (intersex), LGBTQIA (asexual), and even in the possibly most inclusive acronym
ever used: LGBTQQIP2SAA which includes a second Q for questioning (i.e., people cur-
rently questioning their sexual orientation), P for pansexual people, a second A for (straight)
allies and 2S for two spirit people. 2S refers to Native Americans, whose culture believes that
a masculine and feminine spirit can be present in one person simultaneously. However, it is
legitimate to question whether inclusivity can be obtained through acronyms. When would
this stretching and adding become meaningless, and even laughable and useless?
(Venir and Lundin 2015)

Understanding that any attempt to include every group would lead to an unwieldy and still
incomplete abbreviation, we have selected LGBTQ+, even though certain individuals might
feel belittled by being collected into the + category. While we value the unwieldy and that
which is not easily classified, we prefer to use a term that acknowledges exclusions rather
than to pretend that completeness is possible.
14 Amy K. Levin

We did not find common ground among our authors regarding the use of transgender, trans, or
trans* 8 as umbrella terms referring to individuals who identify in various ways, including as
transsexual, transvestite, two-spirit, cross-dressers, nonbinary, or third gender. Contributors Åsa
Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur describe transgender on a spectrum with male and female at each
end; they conceive of nonbinary gender as outside this framework. Le Couteur explains:

trans and nonbinary often apply to very different things. For a great many trans people,
destabilizing the categories of male and female is not something they are interested in at
all: they simply want to be recognized and accepted as the “other” binary sex-and-gender,
which they identify with. To some degree, trans and nonbinary even refer to separate
communities … the argument is regularly made that trans applies exclusively to trans men
and trans women who are medically transitioning. A similar phenomenon to the exclusion
of bi and pan people from gay and lesbian spaces, … part of the “lateral violence” that so
often characterizes marginalized group dynamics.
(2018)

Fully conscious of this gender and sexual diversity, we have cast a wide net.
Other terms related to transgender are also subject to debate. Word choices have been dif-
ficult throughout the process of preparing this book for a variety of reasons, including the fact
that some of the authors were using direct translations from other languages or adopting terms
more common in their activist communities than in theoretical writing. For example, the term
cross-dresser has generally replaced transvestite. More broadly, the presence of cross-dressers in
work on transgender will be controversial. We have included them because one or more
authors discussed them. Another problematic expression is sex assignment, with some strongly
preferring gender confirmation, suggesting greater agency.
Controversy surrounds this term, too, but we adopt cisgender for those who identify with the
sex they were born into and the gender that has traditionally corresponded to it, even though the
most popular alternative, non-transgender, has the advantage of normalizing trans lives and ren-
dering the majority as other. This is consistent with Mel Chen’s assertion that even the most
common sexual binaries are unstable because definitions of man and woman, male and female,
are always already challenged (2017, 154). All of these definitions are politicized; the editors
of Trap Door decided not to adopt a common vocabulary because “In today’s complex cul-
tural landscape, trans people are offered many ‘doors’ – entrances to visibility, to resources, to
recognition, and to understanding. Yet … these doors are almost always also ‘traps’ –
accommodating trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew
to hegemonic modalities” (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton 2017, xxiii). If heteronormativity is
to be undermined by unruliness, we must welcome the broadest variety of terms and
recognize our authors’ freedom to use them as they find appropriate. We demonstrate this
commitment by citing their definitions in this introduction.
When referring to theory, we find marked differences between and among feminist, les-
bian-gay-bisexual, queer, and transgender theories, though all of them challenge traditional
definitions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Feminism’s strength is its fierce dedication to
examining and improving the lives of females, with some holding that it applies only to
women-born-women, a stance with which we disagree. Criticized in early days for a primary
focus on white women, feminist theory has intersected with postcolonial, social class, and
critical race theory in its increasing emphasis on less privileged females. In a similar manner,
 Introduction 15

and using similar methodologies, gay-lesbian-bisexual theory has dedicated itself to exploring
the ways in which binary notions of sexuality maintain and reinforce the dominance of het-
erosexuality. Transgender theory, perhaps the newest of these overlapping approaches, chal-
lenges the idea that biological sex and gender (must) always coincide, strengthening
arguments that gender is essentially a social construction, and not an inherent human quality.
Queer theory attempts to encompass all of these, questioning dualistic thinking and revealing
the multiple ways in which it reinforces a privileged, white supremacist patriarchy. Nguyen
describes it as “including critiques of heteronormativity and reductive binary models of
identity” (2018). Queer is often used as a verb; it is an action, a commitment, a desire even, to
overcome the tendency to categorize humans in ways that limit their potentiality. Queer
expresses an activist and unruly impulse increasingly apparent in curatorship: “reclaiming
present and future queer legacies by understanding queerness not as a supporting role, but as
a defining and central practice” (Mead 2017).
The centrality of queerness as a practice can best be achieved through community-museum
collaborations. Our authors offer useful examples for those studying intersectionality and other
aspects of museum inclusivity, such as the roles of immigrants, people with disabilities, and those
marginalized on the basis of mental health status. In selecting articles for this book, our com-
mitment to human rights activism played a significant role. We called for articles offering a vision
of the role of museums, artists, curators, and communities in effecting social change with respect
to gender and sexuality. Our first call yielded articles addressing important topics, such as trans-
gender inclusion, and they also came from many parts of the globe. Their primary focus was on
Europe and North America, but they also included articles on institutions and/or artists in Sri
Lanka, Turkey, India, and Australia. We recognized that we could not cover the entire globe or
everything related to our emphases (for instance, museums on motherhood and birthing);9
nevertheless, when some authors withdrew, leaving gaps in the collection, we commissioned
additional contributions, including the entire section on major institutions. We also sought pieces
that addressed a greater range of racial and ethnic diversity. We wished to include the work of
black women – whether it was Zanele Muholi’s interrogation of violence against lesbians in
South Africa and self-portraits that repurpose domestic objects, or Sonya Clark’s inspiring Hair
Craft Project.10 However, certain international or minority activist-artists and those who study
their work are immensely in demand and too busy to collaborate with us. Some requested sti-
pends, citing the fact that works by marginalized artists are often undervalued, and we had no
budget for that. And finally, still others engaged in dialogue with us about the exploitation and
commodification of non-Western or minority artists and scholars by museums and galleries; they,
too, declined to participate or requested to be paid. In other words, the intersectional politics of
race, sex, and gender, a central topic in this collection, partly determined its contents. In making
the gaps visible, we draw attention to these circumstances.
All of the accepted works have been reviewed by both editors and revised at least twice.
When authors did not write fluently in English, we edited more intensively to level the playing
field (confidence in using the world’s dominant language is a form of privilege). The book’s
contents were then organized to highlight recurrent themes. This initial section offers signposts
for what follows and introduces the human rights theme of the collection. The first chapter is this
introduction, followed by Amanda K. Figueroa’s essay on Chicana feminist museology, which
proposes an intersectional methodology combining race and gender. Next, Nikki Sullivan and
Craig Middleton examine the ethics of queer inclusion, questioning several common assump-
tions. They indicate how strategies to dismantle white patriarchal supremacy are critical to
16 Amy K. Levin

diversity in public institutions; as my discussion of the Wendt exhibition suggests, racist and
colonial perspectives inhibit full understanding of the ways in which displays are gendered.
Our second section, “Dismantling the Master’s House,” alludes to Audre Lorde’s famous
statement, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1984, 110), exploring
museums as spaces for the promulgation of images and ideologies related to gender and sexuality.
Chapters illustrate the complementarity of major institutions and other spaces, which frequently
have greater flexibility but also more vulnerability due to lack of funding and other resources.
The first half of this section features major institutions associated with colonialism. Articles about
the British Museum (BM) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) present perspectives on
including marginalized groups and educating mainstream audiences about diversity. Stuart Frost
of the BM focuses on an exhibit of Japanese shunga and its “secret histories,” examining the
potential of large institutions to use objects that have been out of the public eye to diversify their
offerings. Dawn Hoskin and Zorian Clayton follow with a chapter on the queer working group
at the V&A and its influence in instigating meaningful changes. They mention the intervention
that is the core of the following chapter, where Matt Smith describes his residency at the V&A.
Smith queered galleries at the V&A by inserting ceramics of his design into existing displays or
juxtaposing objects so that they would generate queer possibilities.
The second half of the section offers a contrast, focusing on alternate spaces. Tuan Nguyen
analyzes the Sydney LGBTQ+ pop-up museum, arguing that the flexibility and spontaneity of
the genre enables museums to work around dominant political forces and to engage democrati-
cally with an ever-changing community; however, these museums may signal only a temporary
commitment to queering. Kelekçi and Akbaş discuss how Ankara’s Ulucanlar Prison Museum
portrays unruly women, perpetuating the suppression of their human rights that began with arrest
and incarceration. Their study contributes to the growing body of research on the perpetuation of
dominant narratives at museums in former prisons, such as Robben Island (Nzewi 2017). Rovel
Sequeira discusses a different exclusion, explaining how Antarang Sex Museum in Mumbai
engaged with postcolonial hermeneutics related to sex and HIV/AIDS. His contribution considers
debates about whether institutions in cultures that are reticent about openly discussing intercourse
can or should be sex-positive. In “Lost Objects and Missing Histories,” Manon S. Parry and Hugo
Schalkwijk examine erasures and absences in narratives about HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands,
offering a perspective on intersections of medical history and sexuality. Their analysis sheds light
on taboos and political issues resembling those in Sequeira’s chapter.
Appropriately, the next section focuses on bodies in the museum. The binaries in the Cool
Japan exhibition, supported by mannequins wearing extreme fashions, remind us that even
when they are absent or merely gestured at, bodies in museums have long served to enforce
or disrupt prescriptive gender norms. This part of the book is divided, too. By making indi-
geneity an explicit topic of discussion in the first subsection, we hope to avoid the issues that
arose in the Wendt exhibit. Ann Cvetkovich confronts decoloniality and queerness in her
piece on artist Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. Camille George-
son-Usher suggests how Indigenous bodies may reclaim sovereignty through exhibitions that
focus on the land. The second half of this section, “Bodies of Ambiguity,” examines how
curatorial and artistic approaches create productive uncertainties around bodies on display.
Natasha Bissonauth’s chapter concentrates on Chitra Ganesh, who combines graphic novel
forms, traditional Indian iconography, allusions to colonialism, and other contexts to create
startling images about Indian women and their sexuality. Clair Le Couteur and Åsa Johan-
nesson also draw on tradition in challenging preconceptions about gender, demonstrating
 Introduction 17

how readings of reproductions of a classical sculpture invoke queerness. The authors suggest
that institutional interpretations of objects may police gender and sexuality unless viewers
play freely with the indefinite and elusive.
The following section, “Acts of Resistance,” contains two parts, “Unruly Women” and
“Problematic Narratives.” The first subsection reminds readers that the recognition and inclusion
of women in museums is not old news. In an era when #metoo captures global headlines;
women have only recently been permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia; and Trump’s Supreme
Court choices may endanger abortion rights in the USA, issues related to the representation of
women remain critically important and must not be ignored. In some cases, current events are
only now making possible exhibitions on topics related to women that have long remained
taboo in museums. The 2018 exhibition The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Con-
temporary Women’s Art in the US, curated by Monika Fabijanska at the Shiva Gallery at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, exemplifies this point, Fabijanska deliberately chose only works by
women because she sees them as efforts to assert control after trauma as well as acts to inform the
public about the prevalence of this violation of human rights (2018). Moreover, certain concerns
related to exhibiting women’s history recur in efforts to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ popu-
lations – for instance, involvement that originally sprang from privileged communities. Irina
Mihalache explores the latter by demonstrating how the Art Gallery of Ontario’s women’s
committees, despite their imbrication in upper middle class white culture, created a proto-fem-
inist space and diversified the institution from within. Jana Sverdljuk discusses another possibility
for change from within, examining how the Digital Museum of Norway illuminates or occludes
the histories of women (and) migrants. The roles of female bodies and objects change according
to their categorization and interpretation; similar circumstances apply to items associated with
LGBTQ+ communities. The third chapter in this section similarly draws attention to collecting,
as Brenda Malone records the National Museum of Ireland’s role in acquiring materials related to
the 2018 Irish abortion rights referendum. This material, categorized to highlight the importance
of women’s lives, has diversified the institution’s holdings while serving as a model for other sites.
Malone’s chapter leads into a subsection on activism that challenges problematic historical
narratives. Catherine O’Donnell was deeply involved in the People’s History Museum’s 2017
exhibition in Manchester, Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights. The effort
included artifacts as well as programming related to such topics as trans lives and lesbian immi-
gration. While O’Donnell focuses on an exhibit that informs about LGBTQ+ lives, Hayden
Hunt examines the reticence, if not outright silence, around Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism in cat-
alogues accompanying exhibitions about her. These gaps echo the ambivalence about sexuality
in the catalogues for Lionel Wendt and Queer British Art; however, Hunt argues that such omis-
sions distort a history that scholars in other fields, such as literary criticism, have long accepted.
His chapter prepares for Joshua G. Adair’s analysis of how particular perspectives on history
support dominant ideologies of race and gender. “Inspirational” (Christian) fiction set in former
plantations (now museums) brings in visitors seeking to experience vicariously the privilege of
white slave mistresses without paying too much attention to their role in the institution of slavery
and the furtherance of white supremacy.
While previous chapters reflect difficulties with exhibiting controversial material, the
final section of this book, “Thinking Outside the Binary Box,” explores innovative
models for gender activism in museums. Michael Petry’s discussion of photographic
artists’ depictions of transgender and nonbinary sexuality contextualizes his interview with
Åsa Johannesson. Johannesson’s images often depict gender ambiguity, troubling binaries
18 Amy K. Levin

and asserting the beauty of those who live outside their duplicitous constraints. In the
following chapter, I draw on interviews as well, serving as coauthor and scribe in
reflections on the Transmission exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum. The purpose of the
article is to offer an exemplar of collaborations drawing transgender communities into
greater visibility through welcoming museum programs. Finally, Anne Rensma, Daniel
Neugebauer, and Olle Lundin explain the theory behind the Van Abbemuseum’s deci-
sion to integrate queering and community engagement into every level of its work,
enhancing its commitment to human rights.
The conclusion, written by Joshua G. Adair, shifts from theoretical and case studies to
reflect on how important it is for museums to interrupt past practices and to encourage
unruly gender expressions. It also emphasizes the necessity for visitors to revisit institu-
tions to see how they have changed. In the process, Adair promotes best practices and
asks readers to look ahead. Will the future be devoid of gender binaries, or are they too
deeply entrenched? Would such a notion ultimately be retrogressive, creating a new
normative sexuality? How will changing notions of gender, sex, and sexuality affect the
museum as we know it? Definitive answers are not available; however, we hope that
perusing this collection will enable students, scholars, museum staff, and members of the
public to consider museums, sexuality, and gender activism in ways that are capacious
and complex.

Notes
1 The US Fulbright program generously made my 2017 research in the Netherlands possible. All
opinions expressed are my own.
2 At an event recognizing the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the US president alluded to
Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahantas. Russell Begaye, president of Navajo nation, characterized
Trump’s remarks as “derogatory” and “disrespectful” (Davis 2017).
3 Sandell’s previous works, including Museums, Equality and Social Justice, edited with Eithne Nightingale
(2012), include sections on gender and sexuality, but these topics are not their primary focus.
4 Jhaveri, assistant curator of South Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to a family
of prominent art collectors and owners of Jhaveri Contemporary Art in Mumbai, which exhibits
and sells Wendt’s work.
5 For an intersectional analysis of kawaii that relates femininity and queerness to nationalism,
neoliberalism, and Orientalism, see Iseri (2015).
6 I noticed small but significant changes when the exhibit reappeared at the Tropenmuseum in 2018. A
room focusing on shunga and Japanese homoerotic prints had been added, together with an area on the
influence of Japanese culture on Dutch design. Manga were shelved differently, with male-oriented
texts on top and female ones below. No subdivisions for “harem” or queer texts were visible.
7 Several catalogue chapters were not written by Barlow. Although these chapters include similar
statements, only Barlow is cited here.
8 Halberstam (2018, 4) proposes an asterisk after the term, drawing from the digital domain to suggest
that all possibilities should be included. In the realm of museums, trans is almost inevitably linked to
sex, sexuality, gender expression, and/or gender identity. Most museums have taken the stance that
trans (with or without an asterisk) does not include many words with the prefix trans-, such as
transnational, counter to Halberstam’s argument.
9 Articles by Knowles and Phipps in Feminism and Museums (2017) cover this topic, emphasizing how
images of childbirth remain taboo because they expose female genitalia. Their perspectives complement
our chapters on the ways in which certain bodies and sex acts remain controversial for museums.
10 Muholi now identifies as nonbinary. Muholi’s work (Stedelijk Museum 2017) can be found at
https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/zanele-muholi-2 and Clark’s (2018) at http://sonyaclark.
com/project/the-hair-craft-project.
 Introduction 19

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Jhaveri, Shanay. 2017. “Lionel Wendt: Recasting the Idiom of Modern Photography in South Asia.” In
Lionel Wendt: Ceylon, 179–191. Amsterdam: Fw: Books.
Jones, Amelia. 2010. “The Return of Feminism(s) and the Visual Arts.” In Feminism is Still Our Name:
Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, edited by Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessika
Sjöholm Skrubbe, 11–56. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kendall, Geraldine 2013. “MA Report Shows High Levels of Public Trust in Museums.” Museums
Association website. https://www.museumsassociation.org/news/03042013-public-attitudes-research-p
ublished.
Knowles, Helen. 2017. “Birth Rites Collection: The Curator’s Perspective.” In Feminism and Museums,
ed. Jenna Ashton, 230–245. Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.
Le Couteur, Clair. 2018. Personal communication with Amy Levin, May 5.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, 110–113. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
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html.
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18. https://curatingthecontemporary.org/2017/05/18/curating-queerness-as-an-activist-practice/.
Message, Kylie. 2017. The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16(3): 6–18.
Nguyen, Tuan. 2018. Excerpt from draft of chapter in this book.
20 Amy K. Levin

Nzewi, Ugochukwu-Smooth. 2017. “Migration Histories, the Past, and the Politics of Memory at
Robben Island Museum.” In Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants in Museums and
Archives, edited by Amy K. Levin, 106–121. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Phipps, Fiona MacVane. 2017. “Birth Rites and the Health and Social Care Professions: A Midwifery
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Lionel Wendt: Ceylon, 199–206. Amsterdam: Fw: Books.
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2
CHICANA FEMINISM, ANZALDUIAN
BORDERLAND PRACTICES, AND
CRITIQUES OF MUSEOLOGY
Amanda K. Figueroa

For Chicana feminist scholars, sites of cultural production are fertile ground for exploring the
formation of identity, subjectivity, and ethnicity.1 To understand and critique the place of
Chicanas in society, they turn to cultural artifacts to see how the intersections of gender, race,
class, and language are processed González through dominant culture. The frameworks cre-
ated by these scholars thus apply to museums. As sites of cultural production and products of
culture themselves, museums are responsible for developing narratives of history and culture
that interest Chicana feminists. The narratives are also shaped by the understandings of cul-
ture that museum workers bring to their profession. As a result, they become sites for critical
exchange and performances of culture, both productive and reactive.
As the roles of museums in conversations about social, racial, and decolonial justice come
to the fore, the analysis of these institutions through Chicana feminist frameworks is more
relevant than ever. For example, Annie E. Coombes (1997), Alicia Gaspar de Alba (1997),
and Jennifer González (2008) have highlighted how curatorial and exhibition practices par-
ticipate in the creation of colonialist and racist power structures. Meanwhile, museum prac-
titioners have begun movements including Museums Respond to Ferguson (Russell and
Brown, 2014–present) and Museums Are Not Neutral (Autry and Murawski, 2017–present).
These efforts are not new, but they are becoming louder and more visible.
This is not to imply that Chicana feminist frameworks are relevant only for the museum field.
But Chicana feminists have developed their thinking about society through and with museology.
Many Chicana feminists focus on the dynamics of gender, race, and power in works of art,
examining their creator(s) and creation, audience, and message. In Chicano Art Inside/Outside the
Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (1997), Alicia Gaspar de Alba explicitly
identifies the CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation) exhibit that toured from 1990 to
1993 as a cultural production.2 She undertakes her analysis from a cultural studies position rather
than solely an art historical one, while artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains (2003) explores the
cultural significance of the domesticana3 aesthetic in Chicana art in an article originally published
in Aztlán, a Chicano studies publication, rather than an art history journal. Domesticana describes
the resourcefulness that occurs when the domestic labor of women coincides with artistic prac-
tice, forming an aesthetic sensibility specific to Chicana art. Such examples demonstrate how
22 Amanda K. Figueroa

Chicana feminists are turning to artwork in order to explain the production and representation of
Chicana identities in culture.
Missing from this examination of the relationship between Chicana feminist thought and
studies of art is the critique of museum environments, which are often the product of white
patriarchal culture. The latter surrounds artworks and shapes how visitors view and engage
with this art. Similarly, Chicana feminists’ examination of museum displays of scientific,
historical, and anthropological artifacts has been overlooked by scholars who take up their
perspectives on artworks. Yet Chicana feminist writers and thinkers are engaging in a cri-
tique that extends far beyond the artworks and artifacts they examine, one that spans the
entirety of museum work. Returning to the interrogation of museum exhibitions by Chi-
cana feminist scholars ensures that the breadth of their critiques and analyses becomes an
indelible part of the dialogue about contemporary museum theory and practice.
Gloria Anzaldúa is one of the most notable Chicana feminists to take up museum exhibitions as
a medium for knowledge production. Anzaldúa frequently turns to visual art in order to under-
stand the relationship between artworks and the process of cultural production. Her distinctive
approach to art as an artifact of culture opens opportunities for the analysis not just of art museums
and art exhibits, but also of anthropological displays. Although a full survey of the ways in which
the field of Chicana feminism has undertaken museological analyses is a viable and necessary pro-
ject, this chapter focuses on Anzaldúa’s work in particular as a case study of museum studies work.4
In order to demonstrate the significance of Chicana feminist museology and its relevance
for contemporary critique of museum institutions and their exhibitions, I begin by outlining
Anzaldúa’s museological analysis and the ways it reflects the broader political commitments of
Chicana feminism. This development will be traced through an intellectual history stemming
from several of Anzaldúa’s works. From there, the major characteristics of Chicana feminist
museology will be established. Because the goal of this chapter is to develop a methodology
of Chicana feminist museology that has bearing on exhibition design and knowledge pro-
duction practices, the essay closes with a case study of the 2017 exhibition Radical Women:
Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. This
exhibition analysis will further flesh out the ways in which a Chicana feminist museology
offers generative valences for understanding museum work.

Anzalduian museology
Throughout her career, Gloria Anzaldúa insisted on the importance of intellectual and theore-
tical labor in and as creative practice, using her own experiences of writing as well as the works of
visual artists to illustrate her thinking. As a figure whose thinking looms large in Chicanx studies,
and whose impact on other fields is still being excavated, Anzaldúa’s work is a major touchstone
within Chicana feminist thought. Her position as a key figure in Chicana feminism is tied to the
role of museology in her writing, which has shifted and developed as Chicana feminism has
evolved. Examining Anzaldúa’s method of museological analysis and its changes over time is a
project of representation, in which the approach must differ for each stage in her career.
Anzalduian thought, broadly speaking, is interested in borderlands as both a heuristic and a
position, both a social and a geographical location. The centrality of the borderland bears
on Anzaldúa’s museological work as well.5 As the intellectual history to follow will explore
in greater depth, Anzaldúa models her thinking as a performative process for readers rather
than simply explaining it as an act that has always already occurred. Following the Chicana
 Chicana Feminism 23

feminist interest in embodiment, Anzalduian museology begins with the body as the site of
knowledge production and understands that body as the location of intersecting borders
of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality.6 It is no wonder then that the liminal position
of museum visitors is a key focus for Anzalduian museology. In Light in the Darkness/Luz
en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, she dwells on the act of entering a
museum as a border crossing. As she stands on the museum’s front steps, she is “standing
on a borderland” (Anzaldúa 2015, 47). By extension, the liminality and ambiguity of art
and artifacts in exhibitions can be properly addressed only by accepting the same liminality
and ambiguity within certain subjectivities, including those of Chicanas. Western art his-
torical, anthropological, and museological practices force viewers into a choice of binaries:
seeing themselves in the nonhuman material representation of culture or as powerful
human colonizers presiding over the collection. Anzalduian borderland practices allow for a
space between these options, a place from which to critique dominant museum practices.
In 1990, Anzaldúa edited the book Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical
Perspectives by Feminists of Color. In her introduction, “Haciendo caras, una entrada,” she writes that
“art is a struggle between the personal voice and language, with its apparatuses of culture and
ideologies, and art museums with their genre laws” (1990, xxiv). Although much of this early
writing has been criticized for its reliance on racial binaries and the appropriation of indigeneity
within Anzaldúa’s theorization of Chicana identity, this quotation demonstrates two characteristics
that define her approach to studies of art: an emphasis on the viewer’s perception and the artwork’s
role as a production of culture. These facets are developed and adjusted throughout her later
writings, but they remain central to Anzaldúa’s Chicana feminist museology.
Anzaldúa touches again on the importance of the perception of art in Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New Mestiza. Framing her writings “as performances and not as inert and ‘dead’
objects,” she describes art as “both a physical thing and the power that infuses it” (1999, 89).
Even more clearly, Anzaldúa asserts that “invoked art is communal and speaks of everyday
life” (89). The term invoked art describes not just a genre of visual or literary art, but the
practice of calling works into being as viewer and co-creator.7 Rather than the passive action
of observing, the description of invoked art pulls viewers into a more active position.
Art is both the object and the experience of viewing it, a dynamic relationship that requires
the artwork and the viewer to produce the art which does not function without them. This
phenomenological approach centers the role of exhibition, which shapes how the artwork is
viewed by an audience. The “power that infuses” every work of art manifests through the per-
ception of it, which can only occur through the vectors made possible in exhibition practice (89).
In choosing the word “communal,” Anzaldúa draws readers’ attention to the network of actors
around the art object, which includes and exceeds the binary relationship of artist and audience
member. Anzaldúa here intervenes in the classic art historical understanding of artwork as a dis-
crete, complete object by emphasizing the necessity of a viewer’s perspective; she also raises the
actors who labor to display the artwork to the level of interlocutors. Thus the perceptive act of
engaging with an artwork is a joint project shared by the artist, viewer, and often-invisible
facilitators such as museum professionals who make the object available to be seen and interpret it
in the ways they deem most important or accessible to audiences.
Anzaldúa is aware that the network that surrounds the artwork is hierarchical. In what she
identifies as a facet of specifically “Western cultures,” Anzaldúa describes the rituals that go into
maintaining artworks: preserving, housing, guarding, and displaying them. These practices, she
concludes, ensure that “the works are treated not just as objects, but also as persons” (90). By
24 Amanda K. Figueroa

contrast, “the ‘witness,’” or viewer of the artwork, “is a participant in the enactment of the
work in a ritual, and not a member of the privileged classes” (90). It is a feature of Anzaldúa’s
networked or performative understanding of art that allows this imbalance of power to come
to the fore; traditional art historical understandings obscure the ritual labor of preservation and
exhibition. Instead, they emphasize the elite roles of traditionally male curators and keepers.
They imagine the viewer to be an art historian or curator, a member of “the privileged classes,”
who, by virtue of access and education, participates in care of the artwork.
Only when conceptual space is left for a viewer who is detached from the artwork, its
meaning, and its place within the museum can we begin to see the art audience which exists on
the margins of museum power. Audiences have the ability to interpret the artwork in ways that
artists and elite museum professionals do not anticipate. When we consider their alternative
interpretations, we see how viewers are able to articulate a meaning for an artwork in ways that
challenge museums’ authority as the sole interpreters of art. In this way, Anzaldúa imagines the
institution as one capable of engaging in activism and human rights work.
Her emphasis in Borderlands/La Frontera on the phenomenological underpinnings of
visual art is a precursor to the performance studies methodology that became prominent
in ethnic and gender studies as well as in Latino and Latin American studies in the early
2000s. Understanding the exhibition of art as part of the performative relationship
between artist and audience member signals the importance of exhibition practice as a
vital feature in the cultural production inherent in museums, which should be analyzed
in its own right.
Published fifteen years after Anzaldúa’s passing, the chapter “Border Arte” from Light in the
Darkness/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, demonstrates an additional
development of her thinking about the role of museums in knowledge and identity forma-
tion. Anzaldúa revises her theories about indigeneity in Chicana feminist identity and scho-
larship and joins the decolonizing movement in ethnic studies. The latter includes an
understanding that Chicanx people are complicit in the occupation of Indigenous lands. She
applies this decolonization practice, with its implicit gendering, to her studies of art.
Anzaldúa describes the experience of walking through Aztec: The World of Moctezuma, a
1992 exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History.8 She uses this experience to
develop her theorizing of border arte, which reinvents the artist and the viewer alike by
incorporating precolonial cultural materials to create something new.9 In keeping with
the concept of invoked art that she began to develop in Borderlands/La Frontera, border
arte moves from the performative to the personal as Anzaldúa uses her own encounter at
the Aztec exhibit as a model for the experience of art that comes from the margins,
outside the “privileged classes” of the art world (60).
Anzaldúa’s understanding of border arte ties deeply to her experiences in this anthro-
pological exhibit, which presents Indigenous history of Mexico and the Americas from a
dominant perspective. Since museums are infamous colonial repositories of art, history, and
culture, the context of the Aztec exhibit yields an aura of completeness and historicity to the
objects on display. The culture that created these treasures is relegated to the distant past.
However, Anzaldúa’s personal experience prior to her visit, which she draws into the gallery
in her thoughts and mental connections, proves that her cultural identity is tied to this his-
tory. And yet, as Anzaldúa observes, she cannot fully lay claim to the indigeneity that the
exhibit centers. She is positioned in the borderlands created by the Aztec exhibition practice,
navigating her way through the liminal mental space it produces.
 Chicana Feminism 25

Inside the exhibit’s main gallery, Anzaldúa examines the preliminary artifacts laid out for dis-
play and illustrates her methodology by performing a particular way of seeing. “Viewing the
figures,” she says, noting the primarily visual way that the exhibit allows for engagement with its
materials, prompts her to consider the relationship between contemporary Chicanx practices and
Indigenous Mexican culture: “I am once again struck by the impact of … ancient Mexican art
forms” (2015, 48). She asks herself, “What does it mean for me – esta jotita, this queer Chicana,
this mexicatejana - to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my
ancestors? Will I find my historical Indian identity here at this museum among the ancient arti-
facts and their mestizaje” (48).10 In this pair of questions, Anzaldúa not only articulates the visual
engagement with the objects of indigeneity enabled by the exhibit, but also calls into question
the ability for Chicana identity and personal history to be displayed in this way. Although her
cultural identity tells her that she has a relationship with this history, the exhibit omits that
continuity because it encapsulates Aztec culture firmly in the past.
As a result, when Anzaldúa writes that “the museum is a colonized structure,” she refers not
just to prior knowledge of this kind of institution, but also to the immediate failure of the
exhibit and institution to challenge her assumption (48). At this point in her trip, she describes
the impact of this “colonized structure” in pathological terms: “a psychosis of sorts. . . . It
induces a double being-ness in me: feeling my Mexican indigenous aspects represented while
at the same time feeling these parts of myself ‘disappeared’” (48). Surrounded by Mexican
Indigenous objects, Anzaldúa still finds herself missing.
In her last movement through the exhibit, shortly before exiting, Anzaldúa clarifies and expands
the intellectual work she has been practicing in both her mind and body. She writes that border
arte “is an art that supersedes the pictorial” (63). Indeed, as the chapter demonstrates, border arte is
spatial, temporal, and relational across the supposed divides of the first two attributes. Throughout,
readers also tour the connections and memories that occur in Anzaldúa’s mind. We explore a
second exhibit of her own making, which includes artists like Santa Barraza, Yolanda López, and
Marcia Gómez. This imaginary exhibit connects Aztec history to its Chicanx descendants in ways
that fill the absences in the physical Aztec show that surrounds Anzaldúa. By making her own
connections to contemporary Chicana artists who more accurately represent her position, Anzaldúa
endows this second exhibit with a more feminist approach to history.
Leaving the Denver Natural History Museum, she notes “image after image” from the day
that moves through her mind (64) as she looks out her taxi’s window. From this pictorial,
visual sense of memory, Anzaldúa shares her final observation: “Along with other border
gente, it is at this site and time, en este tiempo y lugar where and when, I help co-create my
identity con mi arte” (64). Her triple invocation of time and space may seem ironic given
Anzaldúa’s speedy transit, moving from one place and one memory to another, but this is no
contradiction. Not only is the liminal space of transit unavoidable for Chicanas, who occupy
one borderland or another at all times, but also the movement, whether spatial or intellectual,
is a key part of relational and theoretical work, as Anzaldúa demonstrates in this chapter. All
formations of identity, Anzaldúa tells us, are co-created between ourselves and our history (or
lack thereof), ourselves and our community members, ourselves and our institutions.
This final point resonates with the decolonial turn in ethnic studies, particularly Latino and
Latin American studies, which articulates modernity as a co-creation of colonizers and colo-
nized (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2000), in contrast to traditional definitions of modernity as
purely Eurocentric.11 Anzaldúa’s closing description of the function of museums and exhibits
remedies the power imbalance described in Borderlands/La Frontera when she discusses
26 Amanda K. Figueroa

“invoked art” and represents the most foundational articulation of Chicana feminist museology:
museums are co-constructed spaces.
Anzaldúa models the creation of a Chicana feminist museology that incorporates
broader – and later – trends in the field through interventions in the practices of Western
museology. The three interventions exemplified in her writings form the core of a meth-
odology for Chicana feminist museology, communicate the method’s major political
commitments, and demonstrate its generative possibilities for museum studies. These
interventions stem from the Chicana feminist tradition by advancing an experiential,
embodied museum analysis, following each other logically and sequentially so that every
intervention makes the next possible. Understanding museums as major sites for the production
of knowledge and culture is not exclusive to Chicana feminist museology, but the emphasis on
experiential and phenomenological analysis of artworks, exhibitions, and museums grounded in
Chicanx culture is distinctive. If cultural production occurs inside museum settings, we can
examine our own experiences to determine how these productions operate – and their level of
success – just as Anzaldúa uses her experience in the Denver Natural History Museum to
advance a decolonial and gendered critique of the Aztec exhibit.
From this phenomenological approach stems the next intervention of Chicana feminist
museology: the identification of exhibition practice as an object of study and museum staff as
a node in the network of art production. Only when we prioritize human experience in our
analysis of museum objects does the importance of exhibition design and the humans who
enact it become legible. Chicana feminist museology expands the network of actors involved
in the cultural and knowledge production process for which art allows. It makes visitor
perspectives and the work of museum professionals central to the way we understand art.
With this expansion of the interlocutors in the art experience, Chicana museology is
feminist in its critique of the patriarchal hierarchies that grant museum institutions their
power in culture at large. This decolonizing initiative of Chicana feminist museology is
absent from traditional Western art history and museology discourses. It is only when power
structures are completely visible that the processes of knowledge and culture production at
work in museums can be discussed and altered. This commitment to unsettling the colonial
and patriarchal regime in these institutions makes Anzaldúa’s Chicana feminist methods a
performative form of practice rather than an identity.

Radical women: Latin American art, 1960–1985

In order to examine Anzaldúa’s methods, I turn to the exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American
Art, 1960–1985. Developed as part of the Los Angeles, California, exhibition series funded by the
Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Hammer Museum exhibited Radical Women
from September to December 2017. Later, the exhibition toured the United States. Curated by
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, Radical Women features art by woman-identifying artists
from fourteen Latin American countries as well as the United States. In bringing together artists
from both sides of the US-Mexico border, Radical Women enacts the border-making and border-
crossing suggested in the exhibition series title, LA/LA, Latin America and Los Angeles, separated
by the “and/or” alluded to in the forward slash.
Indeed, the Radical Women catalogue begins with a foreword by Ann Philbin, director of
the Hammer Museum, who writes, “It is no secret that Los Angeles is now the largest Latin
American city outside Latin America” (Philbin 2017, 10). Later in their introduction,
 Chicana Feminism 27

Fajardo-Hill and Giunta describe the development of the exhibit, including the June
2014 workshop in which they interrogated the “unresolved” question of “whether or
not to include Chicana and Latina artists” (18). They describe their ultimate decision to
do so, identifying the themes of exclusion and other concerns that bridge the experiences
of Chicana, Latina, and Latin American artists selected for the exhibition. These
descriptions of the geographic and conceptual limits of Radical Women by Philbin as well
as Fajardo-Hill and Giunta demonstrate the slippage that often occurs in defining Chi-
cana, Latina, and Latin American identities, but also their representation in institutions.
How can Los Angeles obviously be a Latin American city, while its Chicana and Latina
artists must justify their inclusion in a display based on the similarity of their concerns to
those of Latin Americans?
Traditional art historical or museological approaches are insufficient to answer this question, as
evidenced by the discrepancies in the catalogue essays. These inconsistencies are evidence of the
authors’ diverse perspectives on the exhibition at various points in its development, so some
mismatch is to be expected. However, Radical Women was the first major survey of Latin
American art by women. As a result, its curators’ decision to include American-born Chicana and
Latina artists was particularly significant. It was not merely a comment or connection in art his-
tory; it emphasized the relationship between American and Latin American latinidad, or shared
cultural identity.12 Thus this exhibit is an appropriate subject for a study that interrogates cultural
production practices and their solidification in the museum.
Part of the difficulty in deciding whether and how to include Chicana and Latina
artists in Radical Women lies in the geographic complexity the artists represent. Their
diasporic presence in the United States troubles not only notions of the continental
border between the United States and Mexico, but also the boundary between specia-
lizations in curatorial work. This trouble is evident in the variations in the organization
of the exhibition and its catalogue, which result in different audience experiences.
Specifically, the exhibition consists of nine major sections, each with its own theme.
Some artists appear in more than one section. Visitors are thus presented with a visual
taxonomy of Latin American and Chicana/Latina art that crosses the boundaries separ-
ating nations and art historical genres. By contrast, the catalogue is organized by artists’
names and countries of origin, and includes essays focusing on particular regions or
countries. Readers of the catalogue must reference the index of artworks by theme to
produce their own spatial awareness of the exhibit, as Anzaldúa’s mental connections
reconstructed the display in the Denver Natural History Museum.
In the exhibition Radical Women, US-born artists are represented alongside their Latin
American counterparts in a way that minimizes their differences. In fact, neither the exhibi-
tion nor the catalogue provides context for Latinas’ or Chicanas’ inclusion despite the fact
that the exhibition is explicitly titled “Latin American Art.” This inclusion results from the
difficult choice presented by traditional museological practice and disciplinary boundaries.
Yet where Eurocentric practices and ways of thinking cannot accommodate the simultaneous
inclusion and exclusion of US-born Chicana and Latina artists, a Chicana feminist approach is
equipped to reconcile the differences by recognizing the condition of these artists, perpetually
residing in the borderlands of geography, art history, and exhibition practice. A Chicana
feminist approach to this exhibit, rooted in Anzalduian borderlands museology, offers analytic
tools that can frame the inclusion of US-based Chicana and Latina artists in ways that do not
conflict with art historical categories such as American art or Latin American art or rely on
28 Amanda K. Figueroa

thematic overlaps between artists from these two areas. Indeed, the liminal position of US-
born Chicana and Latina artists is not an untenable, unresolved question under this model but
rather an established position from which these artists produce their work.
Simply identifying the position of Chicanas and Latinas in this borderland is not the sole
project of Chicana feminist museology; we must also consider how the exhibition enforces
and reifies this position. At the Hammer Museum, the positioning of US and Latin American
artists alongside one another forces visitors to perform their own border crossing, moving
back and forth across the cultural divide, sometimes repeatedly, as several artists are included
in more than one section of the exhibit.
The identification of national citizenship reifies the border that must be crossed. This
thematic organization of the exhibit forces Chicana and Latina artists to perform Latin
American identities (which are always already in flux) in order to justify their inclusion. The
works of renowned US-born artists, including Chicanas Judy Baca and Patssi Valdez, are
displayed among the thematic categories of Latin American art, including self-portraiture,
body landscapes, and feminisms. These themes are relevant to the artworks created by the
Chicana and Latina artists, hence their inclusion, but this exhibition design and the show’s
title of Latin American Art, 1965–1980, precludes any acknowledgment of the uniqueness of
US latinidad. The specificity of perspectives from across the border is rendered invisible not
merely to highlight commonalities between US and Latin American artists, but to avoid
acknowledgment of difference altogether. The two cultures are conflated.
Anazlduian analysis elucidates the difference between American-born latinidad and its
Latin American counterpart as well as its representation in museum. This perspective opens
gallery displays and catalogues to criticism. It also demonstrates how the institutional power
of the museum reinforces the exclusion of US-born Chicana and Latina artists, even as they
are visibly included in both the Radical Women catalogue and the exhibit. To return to an
earlier point, Fajardo-Hill and Giunta describe the decision to include US-born artists fol-
lowing Philbin’s characterization of Los Angeles as a Latin American city. Their underlying
cultural understanding of the relationship between Chicana and Latina identities and Latin
Americans shapes the cultural production to which the Radical Women exhibition contributes.
Visitors see how US-born Chicanas and Latinas are both incorporated and distanced from
distinctions of Latin America, left in a liminal space in the museum and in cultural definitions
at large. As co-creators in the exhibit, visitors participate in the simultaneous inclusion and
exclusion of US-born artists by observing their presence but not the specificity of their per-
spectives. An Anzalduian museology approach is able to identify these power dynamics
between the co-creators of the exhibit – artists, curators, other museum staff, and visitors – in
such a way as to make visible how cultural attitudes to US-born Latina and Chicana artists
are formed through this show.

Conclusion
Museology is a longstanding concern for Chicana feminists because of their interest in cul-
tural production, as well as a site for the continued practice and development of their work.
Excavating the key tenets of a Chicana feminist museology from the writings of Gloria
Anzaldúa allows for an understanding of how this museology has developed alongside Chi-
cana feminism in general as a practice that informs Chicana feminist thought and as a method
for analyzing the political commitments of museums as institutions.
 Chicana Feminism 29

Chicana feminist museology, as an approach to studying the cultural production practices

of museums, offers three major alternatives to traditional Western museology. First, Chicana
museology is feminist in its emphasis on the importance of positionality and reflexivity; it is
grounded in a phenomenological, experiential approach to exhibition analysis. Second, it
focuses on the network of actors and practices that come together around the artwork or
artifact on exhibit, including museum practitioners and visitors. Third, it applies a critical lens
to the hierarchies of power that exist within that network. Through this interest in embodied
reflexivity and critique of dominance within museology, Chicana feminism constitutes a
performative practice rather than simply a politics of identity.
For museum practitioners and scholars, Chicana feminist museology offers new opportu-
nities for understanding how exhibition context may partly determine artworks or artifacts. It
offers professionals a concrete method for making cultural practices an object for study, even
as it demonstrates the essential role of audiences, especially those that inhabit cultural bor-
derlands, in resisting hegemonic thought and creating new meanings. This aligns with current
conversations about the role of museums as cultural institutions that participate in the crea-
tion and perpetuation of colonial and racial hierarchies, which are increasingly resisted by
women and members of minorities.
As a dynamic practice of analysis rather than a static description of identity or political
commitments, Chicana feminist museology has applications for the wider field of museology,
not just exhibitions or institutions that pertain specifically to Chicanx, Latinx, or other ethnic
identities. Chicana feminist museology offers a way of looking at institutions that centers the
viewer, the act of viewing, and the hierarchies of power involved in those acts. As the museum
field continues to examine its place as an authority and leader in cultural production, these
activist human rights aspects of the work must be taken up for analysis, as a Chicana feminist
museology allows.

Notes
1 Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement that examines the positions of Mexican-American
women who identify as Chicana. An offshoot of the Chicano movement, Chicana feminism brings
the lens of gender to examine how race and ethnicity affect Chicana women’s formations of
subjectivity. It considers cultural productions including art as one way of examining these effects.
2 Gaspar de Alba’s allusion to Audre Lorde’s well known statement, “the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house” (1984, 110), is one example of how Chicana feminism has long
aligned itself with other US women-of-color critiques, particularly those by black feminists.
3 Gloria Anzaldúa does not italicize Spanish language in her writing. I follow her example of not itali-
cizing and drawing attention to the language shift, which renders Spanish-language speakers other.
4 I differentiate between museology as the culture-producing practices that center museums as an
object of study and museum studies as the professional practice of developing new strategies and
technologies for museum work.
5 Anzaldúa is intentional in her use of the term borderlands rather than border. Where border designates
an abrupt partition, the borderland is an inhabitable liminal space, a geography unto itself. A border,
as a partition, cannot take a central position as a place or a metaphor because it has no spatial
dimensions. However, as a space that is navigated, crossed, and lived in, a borderland offers a
position from which to see and think and is thus a site for Chicana feminist practices.
6 For a discussion of similar imbrications in works by Indigenous Canadian women, see chapter 12 in
this book.
7 “Invoked art” in Anzaldúa’s writings is eventually replaced by the term “border arte.” The nuances
of this replacement are explored later in her essay.
8 Now known as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
30 Amanda K. Figueroa

9 Anzaldúa specifies that her visit to Aztec: The World of Moctezuma takes place on the exhibit’s opening
day, September 26, 1992 (2015, 47). This likely indicates that during the visit she is still thinking
through the “invoked art” paradigm she lays out in Borderlands/La Frontera, originally published in 1987,
as evident in the 1993 original version of this chapter. The revisions Anzaldúa made to the chapter in
the early 2000s clearly demonstrate an evolution of her theorization of art (2015, 194).
10 In this passage Anzaldúa also considers how her sexuality affects her marginal position. Although the
rest of my analysis focuses on race and gender in Chicana feminist museology, the specificity of
Anzaldúa’s position must not be discounted.
11 I follow the wider social differentiation between the terms Latino, to mean US residents of the Latin
American or Spanish diaspora, and Latin American, a term geographically specific to Central and
South America. The area studies fields that stem from these designations, Latino Studies and Latin
American Studies, have much in common but are considered separate because of this
differentiation.
12 For discussions of how catalogues reflect exhibition ideologies, see the introduction and chapter 19.

References
Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by
Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria 2015. “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de La Frontera.” In Light in the Dark/Luz En
Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Autry, LaTanya S., and Mike Murawski. 2017–present. “Museums Are Not Neutral.” Museopunks
[podcast]. https://soundcloud.com/museopunks/s2-ep27-museums-are-not-neutral.
Coombes, Annie E. 1997. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, and Andrea Giunta. 2017. “Introduction.” In Radical Women: Latin American Art,
1960–1985, edited by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, 17–19. New York: DelMonico Books.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. 1997. Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the
CARA Exhibition. Austin: University of Texas Press.
González, Jennifer A. 2008. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, 110–113. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Mesa-Bains, Amalia. (1999) 2003. “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo.” In Chicana
Feminisms: A Critical Reader, edited by Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga
Najera-Ramirez, and Patricia Zavella, 298–315. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reprint, Aztlan:
A Journal of Chicano Studies 24(2): 157–167. (Citations refer to the Duke University Press edition.)
Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the
Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21(2): 449–514.
Philbin, Anne. 2017. “Foreword.” In Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, edited by Cecilia
Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, 10-11. New York: DelMonico Books.
Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from
South 1(3): 533–580.
Russell, Adrianne and Aleia Brown. 2014–present. #museumsrespondtoferguson [blog]. https://
adriannerussell.wordpress.com/museumsrespondtofergusonarchive/.
3
WARNING! HETERONORMATIVITY
A Question of Ethics

Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

In the museum world, ethics is generally understood in terms of codes of practice consisting of
principles and/or minimum standards. Museum professionals are expected to be familiar with
and guided by them. Codes of ethics produced by organizations such as the American Alliance of
Museums (2000; hereafter AAM), Museums Australia (1999), the Museums Association of the
UK (2015; hereafter MA), and the International Council of Museums (2017; hereafter ICOM)
are strikingly similar: each organization’s most recent version addresses governance, collections,
resources, public-facing activities, community engagement, professional conduct, and institu-
tional integrity.1 Interestingly, despite the fact that displays of sex and of non-heterosexualities in
museums have provoked intense moral debate, none of these documents include “any explicit
directions on how potentially controversial topics, such as sex, should be managed when dis-
played” (Tyburczy 2016, 105), beyond ensuring that they do not contravene local and national
legislation such as obscenity laws.2
In keeping with its thoroughly documented commitment to inclusion and its call for museums
to “develop their role as socially purposeful organizations” (2017, 3), the Museums Association’s
Code of Ethics for Museums states that museums should “treat everyone equally, with honesty and
respect” (2015, 6), “support freedom of speech and debate” (6), “provide public access to, and
meaningful engagement with, collections and information about collections without discrimina-
tion” (10), and “act in the public interest” (7). These principles could be interpreted as advocating
discussions around and engagements with diverse sexualities and sexual practices in museums. They
might also be regarded as exemplifying what Janet Marstine refers to as a “new museum ethics,”
which “contests the authorized view of ethics” (2011a, 5) as formalized standards of conduct that
determine professional practice. According to Marstine, new museum ethics empowers institutions
to embrace their moral agency and “realize their potential as change agents in promoting social
inclusion and human rights both inside and outside the museum” (5). At first glance, Marstine’s
account of new museum ethics and her critique of “authorized museum ethics discourse” are
compelling. However, on closer scrutiny, her analysis fails to recognize the problematic epistemo-
logical commonalities and tensions that underpin both models. In order to queer Marstine’s analysis
and the assumptions that underpin it, and to articulate an alternative understanding of ethics, we
explore an imaginary scenario involving sex and museums. But first, some scene-setting.
32 Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

The ethics of sexual display

As Sequeira notes in chapter 9, exhibitions involving the display of sex and/or of non-
heterosexualities are few (Tyburczy 2016, 104). In fact, one is much more likely, as Jona-
than Katz notes, “to see a discussion or representation of sexual[ity or sex] in popular,
commercial mediums such as TV or film” (2018, 33). This anachronistic silence seems
strange given how much time, energy, and money are spent trying to ensure that museums
remain relevant, and yet, it is perhaps understandable if we consider the legacies - political,
economic, affective – of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s,3 with battles over obscenity,
freedom of expression, censorship, the public good, funding, institutional integrity, and the
like. According to Jennifer Tyburczy, the culture wars engendered “a new emotional habitus
[that] govern[s] affective and embodied relationships between visitors and queer objects” (2016,
102). She illustrates this claim with a discussion of warning signage as “a post-culture war
strategy for managing the public display and consumption of certain kinds of controversial
material in museums” (105).
Warning signs are generally understood as a means by which to “cater to those who may
object to or be offended by the display, without alienating supporters of sexual display”
(112). In this sense, they manage difference and dissent rather than shutting them down, and
thereby they appear to encourage diversity. Warning signs allow museums to engage with
controversial material and to take risks that may not otherwise seem tenable. These signs
might even be said “to do good with museum resources” (Marstine 2011a, 9, emphasis added)
insofar as they make possible the inclusion of people, practices, and ideas often marginalized
in museums. Viewed in this light, warning signs are consistent with new museum ethics and
constitute ethical practice.
For Marstine, new museum ethics is not an unchanging “universal set of values to be applied
indiscriminately” (2011a, 6), but rather, dynamic, contingent, relational, uncertain, adaptive,
improvisational, and “deeply engaged with the world around it” (8). It is not a canon of ideas
based on consensus (6), but instead, an open-ended form of praxis that respects difference,
embraces creative conflict and risk, and refuses closure or “fixity of thought” (7). It “does not
prioritize the institution’s responsibility to objects above all else” (7), but rather, does good with
institutional resources (9). Moreover, the ethical museum today, writes Marstine, “consciously
chooses to assume risk to foster socially inclusive discourse … to encourage democratic pluralism
in the museum” (11). This vision of new museum ethics with its focus on nonhierarchical col-
laboration, inclusion, shared authority, social justice, and human rights, is persuasive. It is in
keeping with – indeed, a product of – the twenty-first century postmodern zeitgeist that per-
vades the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector on a global scale. And its
appeal lies not only in the values such a vision embraces but also in its eschewal of the principles
and practices it associates with “authorized museum ethics discourse.”

Queering warning signs

While we are by no means immune to the pull of this conception of new museum ethics and its
other, it simultaneously disturbs us. Perhaps the easiest way to articulate our dis-ease is to return
to warning signs, and more particularly, to Tyburczy’s critique of their function and effects.
Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Tyburczy conceives such signage as an example of self-
imposed “implicit censorship” (2016, 105). Unlike explicit censorship which involves the
 Warning! Heteronormativity 33

conscious implementation of a principle assumed to be universally applicable, and which almost

always provokes “unanticipated responses and counter representations” (Meyer, cited in
Tyburczy 2016, 12), implicit or “covert censorship” as Katz calls it, “is never understood or
framed as censorship, not even in private” (2018, 36). Consequently, it is difficult to identify and
challenge. As a technology of covert censorship, warning signs engender and are engendered by
what Butler refers to as “a tacit set of norms that are not … explicitly coded as rules” (Butler,
cited in Tyburczy 2016, 105). So, what exactly are these norms, how are they engendered and
how do they contribute to the production of identity and difference and, more particularly, to
social inequalities? And what might this suggest about the ethics?
As Tyburczy sees them, warning signs are performative (in the Butlerian sense): they con-
stitute what they purport merely to describe. In naming (“nonnormative”) sex objects, images,
and/or identities as potentially offensive, dangerous, not suitable for children, and so on,
warning signs (re)inscribe them as such. At the same time, they (re)affirm the normalcy of
exhibits that are not signposted. Warning signs, writes Tyburczy, “construct and theatricalize
divisions between … sexual normalcy … and sexual perversity” (2016, 106), thereby “impos
[ing] an emotional habitus of shame and anxiety on queer sexual consumption” (111).
To explore this claim in more depth, we invite you to participate in an imaginary scenario.
Let’s begin with some questions. Have you ever considered that most of the exhibits in your
workplace (assuming you’re a museum practitioner) could be said to be heteronormative,4
and that therefore, they may be offensive to some people? If so, have you discussed this with
your colleagues? If you have, were your concerns given serious consideration? Did they result
in a decision to place warning signs throughout your institution? We are fairly confident in
assuming that almost every reader will answer in the negative to most, if not all, these ques-
tions. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the idea of placing signs warning visitors that the
displays contain heteronormative content and may cause offense has not only occurred to
you, but now has you thoroughly in its grips. How might you argue that such an interven-
tion is ethical? Are you excited or daunted at the thought of sharing your idea with your co-
workers, your line manager, and your director? Are you confident that they will find your
idea compelling, or are you afraid that they might think it ridiculous and that this might
affect your professional standing?5 Do you imagine that your curatorial intervention will
result in more diverse visitation and/or enhance your institution’s reputation, or are you, or
your colleagues, worried that it might alienate existing audiences, bringing the museum into
disrepute? Are you concerned about losing funds? Do you decide to keep your idea to
yourself, at least for now?6
In a context in which inclusion, nonhierarchical collaboration, democratic pluralism,
shared authority, social justice, and human rights have become values which are often taken
for granted, why has this use of warning signs not, as far as we are aware, occurred? Why
isn’t it happening in every museum? And why does even the suggestion that it could or
should happen seem so fraught? In order to provide a possible answer, we turn now to an
examination of the relationship between ethics and identity.

Why ethics might be unethical

Authorized codes of ethics, writes Marstine, “define appropriate behavior, establish responsi-
bilities … offer means for self-assessment” and assessment by others. They “are aimed at
professionalizing individual practitioners and are … based on western enlightenment ideals of
34 Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

virtue” (2011a, 7). Conformity and adherence to these standardized ideals equates to objec-
tive professional practice and is rewarded by a privileged position in the institutional hier-
archy. At the same time, dissent is equated with a lack of professionalism and may result in
censure. In other words, ethical codes of practice are disciplinary, normalizing, and “com-
plicit in our subjection” (Diprose 1994, 23). They (re)produce good museum citizens who in
turn reify the practices and habitats that shape them as such. Inherited ways of knowing,
doing, and being are internalized through this process of socialization and professionalization.
They are difficult to throw off since “they make me who I am” (Haraway 2004, 1). Their
reproduction is not necessarily intentional; nor is it wholly conscious. Rather, it is an effect
of what Pierre Bourdieu (1980) calls “habitus.” Bourdieu uses this term to refer to the
embodied dispositions or “trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel, and
act in determinant ways” (Wacquant 2005, 316) acquired through processes of professional
acculturation, embodying the norms of a particular organizational culture.7 These habits become
so deeply ingrained that they feel natural and uncontestable. Consequently, we tend to pay them
little critical attention. Bourdieu refers to this as a “feel for the game” (1990, 58), an unconscious
(or less-than-conscious), tacit, know-how, that makes us effective players (professionals) within a
particular field.
For Bourdieu, the social world is composed of fields,8 each with its own rules, rationales,
practices, positions, power relations, and underlying organizing principles. Within these fields,
individuals operate to obtain desirable resources: these range from the respect of one’s peers to
the position of CEO. Bourdieu refers to these resources as a form of capital. The more effectively
one operates in a given field, the more capital one will accrue, and the more capital one has, the
more likely one is to attain success, however that is defined within the field. In addition, accu-
mulated capital yields the ability to influence the field, to determine what counts as core business,
best practice, or simply success. These value judgments serve the interests of those who make
them, maintaining their insider status. At the same time, they exclude individuals, forms of
knowledge, and practices that do not or cannot fit, and these exclusions appear inevitable. From
this perspective, the absence of signs warning of heteronormative content is an (unconscious and
habituated) enactment of covert censorship that is produced by and reproduces the organizational
culture. Its effects are insidious. Katz claims that “covert censorship, namely the restrictive palette
through which nearly every large museum in the US adjudicates artwork, interpretive texts, and
ideas, is the real enemy” (2018, 33) because it is invisible and thus difficult to challenge. Not
exhibiting material that may “corrupt young minds,” or placing such material behind warning
signs would constitute best practice for many museum practitioners, yet, as Diprose points out, “a
positive ethics, which assumes or aims for a common good, can do more harm in a day than any
transgressor of moral codes could do in a lifetime” (1994, 131).
Despite Marstine’s assumption that new museum ethics is not regulatory since it does not
consist of a list of dos and don’ts that define best practice, we contend that it is no less implicated
in the constitution of (professional) identity and difference, in inclusion and exclusion, than
authorized or traditional museum ethics discourse. As Bourdieu’s account of habitus demon-
strates, ethics, as a practice informed by embodied values and idea(l)s particular to a given field or
organizational culture, “is about being positioned by and taking up a position in relation to
others” (Diprose 1994, 18) and to a field. While undoubtedly more open, flexible, and het-
erogeneous than a set of principles presumed to be universal and ahistorical, new museum
ethics performatively constitutes the ideals it embraces through a process of abjection (new
museum ethics is not …) that at once invokes the other (authorized museum ethics
 Warning! Heteronormativity 35

discourse), and constructs it as such. New museum ethics becomes “ethical,” then, through
the invocation of what it is not as “unethical,” “less-than-ethical,” not ideal. Therefore, new
museum ethics functions as a disciplinary technology of citizenship that aligns individuals with
the values of the twenty-first century museum. In doing so, it produces self-regulating subjects
(professionals with a feel for the game) “and integrate[s] these into a hierarchy of domination,
control, and mutual dependence” (Diprose 1994, 23). Here we are reminded of Diprose’s
observation that “ethics may be found to be unethical insofar as it reproduces inequalities” (27).
As we understand it, the problem at the heart of the models of ethics that Marstine out-
lines is the understanding of the individual (or, we might say, of subjectivity) that both
uncritically assume. If authorized museum ethics is “a canon of ideas based on consensus”
(2011a, 6); “a system of decrees and prohibitions instituted to control behavior, as does the
law, but without the enforcement incentive” (7) and “defined by codes” (7), then it pre-
supposes a rational, autonomous, disembodied, self-transparent subject whose actions (in
adherence to or rejection of ethical codes) are a result of conscious intent. This assumption is
less obvious in the account of new museum ethics Marstine gives, not least because in an
attempt to avoid prescription (and thus to differentiate new museum ethics from authorized
museum ethics) she articulates the former in terms of what it is not: for example, it ”is not a
canon of ideas based on consensus” (6). However, in her discussion of “social responsibility”
and the role of the twenty-first century museum, Marstine advocates “consciously choos[ing] to
assume risk to foster” social inclusion (11, emphasis added), being “willing to accept the
responsibility of activism” (13, emphasis added), embracing “radical transparency” and the
uncertainties it brings (14–15),9 and, as we noted earlier, “do[ing] good with museum resources”
(8, emphasis added). While these aims may undoubtedly be more appealing to the majority of
twenty-first-century museum practitioners than a rigid adherence to conservative norms
associated with authorized museum ethics discourse, they, too, assume subjects whose actions
are a result of conscious intent. Moreover, in equating “doing good” with the ideals and values
of a particular habitus, this vision fails to interrogate them critically, as well as the epistemolo-
gical assumptions that underpin them, and the possible effect they produce.10

Queer/ing ethics
In failing to recognize the embodied character of being and to analyze the ways in which
identity and difference are constituted in and through relations with others and with a world
(and, in this case, a field, namely, the museum), new museum ethics does not (and cannot)
move beyond the epistemological limits of authorized museum discourse. Consequently, it
does not (and cannot) explain why, despite at least two decades of talking about inclusion,
nonhierarchical co-creation, polyvocality, social justice, and so on, museums in general con-
tinue to attract only a very small proportion of the population; or why “non-mainstream”
genders and sexualities remain largely absent. Why is it that inclusion, the sharing of authority,
and other such idea(l)s are so easy in theory and so difficult in practice?
It is our contention that the notion of habitus (of place, practice, personhood, and the
relations between them) helps to explain why this is so. Moreover, we argue for an account
of ethics that recognizes the constitutive relation between one’s world, one’s embodied
being, and one’s actions. As Diprose explains, ethics derives “from the Greek word ethos,
meaning character and dwelling or habitat. Dwelling is both a noun [the place in which ‘I’
come to be in relation to others] and a verb (the practice of dwelling-with); my dwelling is
36 Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

both my habitat and my habitual way of being” (1994, 18). In other words, my habitual way
of life (or ethos as Diprose refers to it), the habits (thoughts, feelings, actions) that, in and
through their performance, make me, are both shaped by and shape the habitus in which I
dwell. Moreover, as Diprose argues, insofar as one’s ethos (one’s selfhood and its enactment)
is constituted in relation to the habitat in which one dwells, it necessarily involves taking a
position in relation to others and is therefore implicated in the co-constitution of identity and
difference (19). What this means in practice is that people, organizations, and practices that
are perceived as embodying and reproducing the ideals associated with authorized museum
discourse will necessarily be cast as other and positioned as such in the field, with all the
material effects of being positioned thus.
In critiquing Marstine’s account of new museum ethics, we are not suggesting that it is
simply wrong or without value. There is much that we agree with in her view of new
museum ethics, including the desire for openness, contingency, and heterogeneity. So
how might we build on the strengths of Marstine’s propositions and at the same time attempt
to move beyond its blind spots? One answer can be found in the account of ethics Foucault
develops in “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault envisages ethics as a practice, “an ethos, a
philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the his-
torical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us [or, we might say, the habitus that con-
stitutes us] and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (1991, 50). Rather
than assuming grounding certainties (such as the rightness of inclusion, democratic pluralism,
and so on), ethics, in this sense, is queer: it is a dynamic process, an ongoing negotiation with
the impossibility of ever arriving at a definitive resolution. Lest this should sound nihilistic,
we argue, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida (1992), that this impossibility does not
render ethics redundant. Rather, it requires that instead of retreating to the security of already
established moral idea(l)s and norms (an operation which, as Derrida would see it, is
mechanical, perfunctory, empty of ethical content), we rise to the ethical challenge of
thinking beyond what we (think we) know. We must be open to unknowable otherness, for
example, to ways of knowing, being, doing, that may not be immediately intelligible to us.
In other words, rather than arguing for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ his/stories, practices,
modes of being, in order to redress past imbalances, or suggesting that we replace an
oppressive model of museological practice with a liberatory one, we advocate instead, a
troubling of the categorical logic that underpins these kinds of claims. In doing so we want to
avoid what Bradburne describes as the common tendency among museums, “to become
locked in the perverse logic of representation”; to replace “‘bad’ old grand narratives” with
“‘good’ new decentered” ones, to “make museums of victims” rather than “of heroes,” to
“make museums that trumpet new identities” instead of museums that “celebrate imperial
identity” (2011, 276).11
This reconfigured notion of ethics is, in Derridean thought, inextricably bound up with a no
less radical view of justice as a practice of undecidability rather than a determinable end that can
be reached via preestablished moral pathways, for example, the assumption that LGBTQ+
inclusion contributes to social justice as a common good. Justice, writes John Caputo in his
account of Derrida’s work, “is not found somewhere either here, in present actuality, nor up
ahead as a foreseeable ideal, a future present… [J]ustice solicits us from afar, … from and as a
future always structurally to come” (1997, 134–135). In other words, while justice may not be
attainable in any absolute, universal sense, its impossibility profoundly solicits us, draws us out of
ourselves, out of our comfort zones, and moves us to engage in the work of ethics.
 Warning! Heteronormativity 37

The notion of queer ethics that we advocate is exemplified by our discussion of the use of
warning signs alerting visitors to heteronormative content and its insidious but often deadly
effects. As a critical intervention, this practice does not call for the inclusion of non-
normative identities, practices, or relations, nor is it predicated on a notion of good that
might be attained in the present or structure future trajectories. It does not presume
identities whose incorporation into the mainstream body of the museum can be quantified,
commodified, utilized in the interests of “auditable diversity” (Dewdney, Dibosa, and
Walsh 2012, 116), 12 nor is it oblivious to its own situated and necessarily limited frames
and possibilities. Instead, our ethics critiques the (hetero)norms that are so pervasive in hege-
monic structures of museological practice, identity, and difference as to seem invisible and that
are, for the most part, reproduced less than consciously. Through this dynamic process of
interrogation, our proposal for a queer ethics experiments with the possibility of going beyond
norms and their antitheses. How queer!

Notes
1 The emphasis on various aspects of museum practice differs, however. The AAM and the MA pay
more attention to what we might think of as outward-facing activities than to internal issues such as
collecting, deaccessioning, and conservation. As such, these documents could be said to reflect more
closely the recent shift away from an object-centered understanding of the museum and toward an
audience-centered one.
2 The LGBTQ Alliance, an American Alliance of Museums Professional Network, has produced
LGBTQ Welcoming Guidelines for Museums which outlines standards of excellence across a range
of aspects of museum business and enables individual organizations to evaluate their practice and
track their progress. However, the fact that this document is separate from the AAM’s Code of
Ethics for Museums is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it constitutes the LGBTQ
Guidelines as having a different, and we would suggest lesser, status than the Code of Ethics, and
second, it conflates (questions of) sex/uality and gender diversity with LGBTQ+ and maintains the
illusion of the (heteronormative) museum as an unsexed or sex-neutral space.
3 For a detailed account of the culture wars and museum censorship, see Steiner (2011).
4 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner use the term heteronormativity to refer 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” (1998, 548). In the decades since
the publication of this definition, the term had been broadened to include the privileging of
cisgender, whiteness, able-bodiedness, and so on. See Marchia and Sommer (2017).
5 In a blog post titled “Diversity Means Disruption,” archival decolonist and First Nations activist
Nathan Sentence describes the ways in which interrogations of whiteness are silenced through the
construction of the critic as a troublemaker, overly sensitive, and so on (2018). Criticism of het-
eronormativity is often met with similar responses.
6 For an account of self-censorship, see Seally (2016).
7 For more on organizational culture and change, see Taylor and Kegan (2017).
8 See Chapter 4 of The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1980, 66–79).
9 According to Marstine, “Radical transparency is a liberatory antidote to the assumed alignments and
readability of knowledge. . . . It is a mode of communication that admits accountability. . . . For
our publics radical transparency offers the freedom to make informed choices in order to experience
what they wish and to participate as they’d like. For the museum sector it reveals choices and
actions that can be amended” (2011a, 14).
10 Elsewhere, we argue that social inclusion discourse may not lead inevitably to equality, social jus-
tice, and so on (Sullivan and Middleton 2019).
11 Clair Le Couteur and Åsa Johannesson also discuss the problematic nature of binaries in chapter 14
in this volume.
12 For an insightful critique of social inclusion discourse in the UK, see Dewdney, Dibosa, and
Walsh (2012).
38 Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton

References
American Alliance of Museums. 2000. “AAM Code of Ethics for Museums.” https://www.aam-us.org/
programs/ethics-standards-and-professional-practices/code-of-ethics-for-museums/.
American Alliance of Museums LGBTQ Alliance. 2016. “Welcoming Guidelines for Museums.”
https://www.aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/lgbtq_welcome_guide.pdf.
Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24(2): 547–566.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bradburne, James M. 2011. “Visible Listening: Discussion, Debate, and Governance in the Museum.”
In Marstine 2011b, 275–284.
Caputo, John. 1997. “Justice, If Such a Thing Exists.” In Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with
Jacques Derrida, edited by John Caputo, 125–155. New York: Fordham University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Dewdney, Andrew, David Dibosa, and Victoria Walsh. 2012. “Cultural Diversity: Politics, Policy, and
Practices: The Case of Tate Encounters.” In Museums, Equality and Social Justice, edited by Richard
Sandell and Eithne Nightingale, 114–124. London: Routledge.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 1994. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference. London:
Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1987. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, volume 2. New York: Knopf Doubleday.
Foucault, Michel 1991. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow,
32–50. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Haraway, Donna. 2004. “Introduction: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations.” In The Haraway Reader,
edited by Donna Haraway, 1–6. London: Routledge.
International Council of Museums (ICOM). 2017. “ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums.” https://
icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICOM-code-En-web.pdf.
Katz, Jonathan. 2018. “Queer Curating and Covert Censorship.” On Curating 37: 33–38.
Marchia, Joseph, and Jamie M. Sommer. 2017. “(Re)defining Heteronormativity.” Sexualities
(November): 1–29.
Marstine, Janet. 2011a. “The Contingent Nature of the New Museum Ethics.” In Marstine 2011b, 3–25.
Marstine, Janet, ed. 2011b. The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics. London: Routledge.
Museums Association. 2015. “Code of Ethics for Museums.” https://www.museumsassociation.org/
download?id=1155827.
Museums Association. 2017. “Museums Change Lives.” https://www.museumsassociation.org/muse-
ums-change-lives/the-impact-of-museums.
Museums Australia. 1999. “Code of Ethics.” https://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/
uploaded-content/website-content/SubmissionsPolicies/ma_code_of_ethics_1999.pdf.
Seally, Katherine. 2016. “Self-Censorship in Museums: The Case of Sex: A Tell All Exhibition.” The
iJournal 1(2). https://theijournal.ca/index.php/ijournal/issue/view/1783/76.
Sentence, Nathan. 2018. “Diversity Means Disruption.” Archival Decolonist [-o-] [blog], November
28. https://archivaldecolonist.com/.
Steiner, Christopher B. 2011. “Museum Censorship.” In Marstine 2011b, 393–413.
Sullivan, Nikki, and Craig Middleton. 2019. Queering the Museum. London: Routledge.
Taylor, Chris, and Mischa Kegan. 2017. “Organizational Culture and Change: Making the Case for Inclu-
sion.” In MAAS [Museum as Site for Social Action] Action Toolkit, edited by Jacqueline White, 33–72.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58fa685dff7c50f78be5f2b2/t/59dcdd27e5dd5b5a1b51d9d8/150764
6780650/TOOLKIT_10_2017.pdf.
Tyburczy, Jennifer. 2016. Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Wacquant, Loic. 2005. “Habitus.” In International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, edited by J. Becket
and Z. Milan, 315–319. London: Routledge.
PART II
Dismantling the Master’s House?
Amy K. Levin

This section draws its name from US writer Audre Lorde, who famously said, “The master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde added, “They may allow us temporarily to
beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (1984,
110). The chapters in this section offer an extended meditation on the extent to which this
statement is true, considering major institutions, which might be considered exemplars of the
“master’s house,” as well as smaller spaces which appear to offer greater possibilities for flexibility,
innovation, and disruption. In the context of exhibitionary institutions, the situation has become
more complex than Audre Lorde might ever have imagined.
The decade or so following Lorde’s radical statement coincided with the publication of
books that reimagined the role of museums, such as Peter Vergo’s New Museology (1989);
Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine’s Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display
(1991); Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995); and Carol
Duncan’s Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (1995). The latter work was particularly
notable for its intense scrutiny of the ways in which such institutions “frame” women (117).
Taken together, these critical examinations of the imbrications of museums in the politics of
national power structures may not have dismantled the master’s house, but they exposed the
ways in which its bricks and mortar relied on white male privilege; inherited colonial values;
and the continuing marginalization of sexual, racial, and ethnic minorities, as well as those
disadvantaged by social class. Arguably, these volumes employed the master’s tools – the
conventions of academic discourse and well-established presses – to convey their theses.
Another radical attack on elite traditions within museums came from artist-curator Fred
Wilson, with Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society (1992–1993). Wilson used
the master’s tools to undermine (hence the exhibition’s title) traditional curatorial practices. He
inserted slave shackles into a display of colonial silver; he set a white Ku Klux Klan hood in a
baby carriage; he placed black pedestals with no sculptures on them in juxtaposition with white
pedestals topped with busts of well-known Maryland citizens of European descent. Through
irony and unexpected encounters, visitors were forced to think about the ways in which US
culture was built upon the systemic oppression of slavery. Wilson used the collection of an
organization begun in the Maryland Colonization Society in 1884 against itself (Maryland
40 Amy K. Levin

Historical Society 2018), inspiring generations of artists and thinkers to use the “master’s tools” to
dismantle his authority.
These two examples – from museum theory and practice – illustrate the possibilities for
using the master’s tools to alter cultural institutions and, by extension, to promote social
change. The chapters in both parts of this section put Lorde’s statement to the test. The first
part offers three discussions of major institutions, the kind that traditionally have been per-
ceived as sustainers of the status quo. Yet through installations and programs that share the
spunk and audacity of Wilson’s work, these museums have challenged not only their histories
but also the origins of their collections.
Stuart Frost begins by analyzing an exhibition on Japanese shunga or erotic art from the col-
lections of the British Museum in London. In the past, such work would have been stored out of
public sight in a Museum Secretum, available only to scholarly male curators, who presumably
would not be corrupted by them and their open expressions of sexuality. When the museum
decided to create an exhibition around this collection, it faced legal restrictions on the display of
sexually explicit materials and discomfort around the violence depicted in some of the art. With
labels that carefully contextualized the works, the exhibition proceeded and received strong
positive evaluations from audiences. Other museums have followed suit with shows on shunga
and related topics, suggesting that major institutions can significantly change their approaches.
In the next chapter, Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin offer an example of activism “on
the inside.” They persuasively demonstrate how a feisty and courageous band of museum
workers can render a major institution more welcoming to LGBTQ+ populations. The
queer working group at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London is situated both
within and outside the structures of an institution deeply imbricated in nineteenth-century
imperialism – the absence of official status permits the group to act quickly and decisively
(even though the lack of resources poses challenges). Yet the group’s situation within a
“master’s house” also lends significance to its actions, which have included everything from
tagging items in the database with gendered terms to tours focusing on queer content; from
public programs on famous gay and lesbian artists to support for LGBTQ+ museum workers.
The following chapter, by artist Matt Smith, provides an extended example of an inter-
vention to queer the V&A. Like Fred Wilson’s installations, the art Smith created during a
residency at the museum used existing objects and cases to shed light on groups that have not
been central to traditional exhibitions – in this case LGBTQ+ populations. Smith’s humor
and knowledge of the collection led to an outreach project with queer senior citizens as well
as a Eurovision Song Contest-style ranking of objects, titled From Butch to Camp.
While these three chapters focus on activist projects and disruptions from within major
museums, the second part of this section emphasizes the role of alternative spaces. Tuan
Nguyen considers the potential of pop-up museums, especially for exhibitions about sexu-
ality. He suggests that small, temporary sites afford flexibility outside the constraints of tradi-
tional museums. Moreover, they promote the engagement of community members as equals.
At the same time, Nguyen emphasizes the drawbacks inherent in the limited duration of
these projects as well as their location outside systems that provide larger institutions with
financing, buildings, and other structural necessities.
Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş turn to the museum at the former Ulucanlar Prison in
Ankara. The domain of political prisoners, including women and sexual minorities, this site
holds a significant place in the history of rebellion against dominant regimes in Turkey. The
authors demonstrate, however, that the site remains a “master’s house” because the stories of
 Dismantling the master’s house? 41

women and queer convicts are minimized or erased in favor of histories that uphold the
authority of the current regime.
Similarly, Rovel Sequeira draws attention to a museum that appeared to serve the dis-
advantaged – Mumbai sex workers – with its placement next to a health clinic. But the
educational goals of the institution, existing within a culture of reticence about sex and
sexuality, rendered it only partly successful in conveying its messages about sex and HIV/
AIDS before it closed. Sequeira’s chapter suggests the vulnerability of alternate spaces in
cultures that are racing to become part of a globalized (and Westernized) world.
Finally, Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk address the collection and display of
objects related to HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands. They trace the history of exhibitions on
the subject, showing how certain organizations have participated in collecting ephemera
such as prevention advertisements and health reports. At the same time, valuable material
culture is being lost due to disinterest and neglect. The kinds of radical interventions
available to institutions such as the British Museum and the V&A are less frequently
accessible to museums that have less social and political power.
In assessing the relevance of Lorde’s statement to museums today, then, a complicated
picture emerges. New tools and smaller “houses” with less authority offer flexibility and
engage gender and sexual minorities, even as they draw attention to the issues that are
important to these populations. As Parry and Schalkwijk in particular argue, this attention
engages target populations and prepares the broader public for social change. But the very
fact that alternate spaces and organizations cannot consistently access the authority accorded
to major institutions may reduce their impact when compared to activist efforts from within
the latter. The question remains, as Lorde suggests, whether these are true victories leading to
radical, long-term change.

References
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge.
Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Dis-
play. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, 110–113. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Maryland Historical Society. 2018. “MdHS History.” https://www.mdhs.org/about/mdhs-history.
Vergo, Peter. 1989. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books.
A. Major Institutions
4
SEX AND SENSITIVITIES
Exhibiting and Interpreting Shunga at the British
Museum

Stuart Frost

Introduction
The British Museum, founded in 1753, was a product of the Enlightenment.1 Its collection has
grown exponentially over time to around eight million works that tell the story of human
culture from its origins to the present. For much of the institution’s long history it has had a
difficult relationship with sex, sexuality, and gender diversity. Most museums and galleries –
including the British Museum – have been reticent to display publicly, or meaningfully inter-
pret, objects that explicitly reflect these themes, or which challenge society’s heteronormative
ideals (Tyburczy 2016).
The museum’s special exhibition program has been an important means of addressing this
lacuna from around 2000 onwards. This chapter focuses on the Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in
Japanese Art exhibition that ran between October 3, 2013, and January 5, 2014 (Clark et al.
2013; Gerstle and Clark 2013). The exhibition, curated by Timothy Clark, Andrew Gerstle,
Aki Ishigami, and Akiko Yano, was one of the outcomes of a large international research
project focused on shunga, and the first substantial show in the UK dedicated to a unique
cultural phenomenon. It drew on loans from Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the
USA, as well as the British Museum’s collection of over three hundred works (Buckland
2010).2 Exhibiting shunga in a balanced and representative manner posed numerous chal-
lenges. This chapter explores some of these issues by drawing on evaluations commissioned
by the author to inform the development of the exhibition and to measure its public impact.

What is shunga?
Between 1600 and 1900, sexually explicit paintings, prints, and illustrated books known as
shunga (spring pictures) were produced in Japan in vast quantities (Buckland 2010; Clark et al.
2013; Screech 1999). Shunga depicts sex in varied contexts, often in domestic settings with
husbands and wives, in a manner that usually emphasizes mutual pleasure. Humor is often
also an important aspect of the genre. Shunga portrays sex of all kinds, including same-sex
lovemaking. Shunga was produced by many of Japan’s most celebrated and exhibited artists,
46 Stuart Frost

including Kitagawa Utamaro (d. 1806) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), and it often
displays high aesthetic qualities. Woodblock printing allowed shunga to be produced on a
mass scale at a cost that was affordable for many Japanese, one sheet print in the early 1800s
costing roughly the equivalent of a double helping of noodles in a restaurant.
Shunga fulfilled multiple functions and was used by men and women of all classes for a
variety of purposes including entertainment, sex education, seduction, arousal, and mas-
turbation. Traditional Japanese spiritual beliefs celebrated the importance of procreation:
there was little sense that sex was sinful. Shunga was generally tolerated by the authorities and
rarely actively suppressed in early modern Japan. Attitudes gradually changed following
contact with the USA and Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, and by
the twentieth century shunga had become taboo in Japan.
Shunga has only been subjected to rigorous academic scrutiny relatively recently, and it
began to be included in exhibitions in Europe and the USA from the 1960s onwards. Even
in recent years, shunga has been omitted from exhibitions where its inclusion would have
been entirely appropriate. The major Hokusai retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris, in
2014, for example, omitted the artist’s shunga (Dalon and Seiji 2014), a fact commented upon
in Art Newspaper (“In the Frame” 2015).3
Although the sexual explicitness of shunga challenged mainstream Western sensibilities, shunga
was collected privately by individuals from the 1860s onwards (Bru 2013; Museu Picasso Bar-
celona 2010; Quignard and Seckel 2007). Some private collections were subsequently donated
to, and accepted by, museums and libraries at a time when it would have been impossible to
display the work (Frost 2015; Quignard and Seckel 2007). The institutional collecting of shunga is
evidence that it was perceived to have value and cultural significance, even though it could not
be exhibited.

Collecting shunga at the British Museum

The British Museum first acquired shunga in 1865 as part of a collection donated by Dr George
Witt (1804–1869).4 Witt’s collection consisted of hundreds of objects from around the world,
mostly related to phallic worship, and a number of leather-bound albums. Three of the latter
focused on Japan, with two containing around 120 examples of shunga. There was no question of
Witt’s collection going on display, and its acquisition led to the formalization of a restricted
collection that came to be known as the Museum Secretum or secret museum (Gaimster 2000,
2001; Wallace 2007). A less formal restricted collection for sexually graphic material existed at the
museum from at least the 1830s, but the acquisition of Witt’s artifacts meant that a more sys-
tematic approach to the growing collection was needed (Gaimster 2000, 2001).
The existence of the collection was not shared widely, and access was carefully regulated. The
creation of a separate secret collection for sexually explicit works was not unique to the British
Museum. The Secret Cabinet at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples, predates the
British Museum’s Museum Secretum (de Caro 2000; Wallace 2007). Libraries also created separate
classifications or private cases; the Bibliothèque Nationale’s restricted collection, which included
some shunga, acquired the name l’enfer or hell (de Caro 2000; Cross 1991; Quignard and Seckel
2007).5 Objects confined by curators to secret museums were considered obscene or porno-
graphic by society at that time, often ignoring how the works were used or understood in their
own culture or period. This hindered serious study, and the omissions from displays distorted the
way members of the public perceived and interpreted different cultures.
 Shunga at the British Museum 47

During the 1950s, attitudes toward sex and sexuality in England continued to liberalize, and
by 1953 the Museum Secretum ceased to operate actively. Objects were gradually dispersed to the
appropriate curatorial departments, and some began to be displayed. However, shunga only
began to be exhibited from the 1970s onwards – and initially only the less graphic works
(Crighton 1973). More explicit examples were displayed in The Passionate Art of Utamaro at the
British Museum during 1995 (Asano and Clark 1995), and also in small quantities in free
admission displays from the late 1990s onwards.6 The remnants of the Museum Secretum, con-
sisting of objects of less academic interest or aesthetic quality, were preserved in the Prehistory &
Europe Department (now Britain, Prehistory, and Europe) until the early 2000s, when they
were fully integrated into the main collection. The Museum Secretum no longer exists, but it has
arguably left an enduring legacy because the material it once held has received less curatorial
attention and is still underrepresented and underinterpreted in permanent displays.

Developing a shunga exhibition at the British Museum

Attitudes to sex and sexuality in the UK have changed radically over the last fifty years; in par-
ticular, the last fifteen years have seen rapid liberalization. There has been significant legislative
change and relaxation of censorship. The ubiquity of explicit material and pornography on the
internet has expanded society’s tolerance. Given the pervasiveness of sexualized imagery in
popular culture, it might be assumed that developing an exhibition of shunga would be relatively
straightforward. However, numerous sensitivities remained, and we felt it necessary to explore
several issues with prospective audiences. Consequently, we held five focus groups at an early
stage to explore potential visitors’ reactions to shunga as a category of material, to assess their
responses to the exhibition’s proposed structure, to identify any sensitivities, and to inform the
marketing (TWResearch 2013). The results of these discussions are presented in depth below, as
they reveal both the status of discourse on explicit sex and sexuality in museums and offer useful
insight for other institutions planning exhibitions on these topics.
Would the public accept the curatorial view that shunga was art, art that celebrates sex, reflect-
ing mutual pleasure between lovers?7 How would individuals respond to images of same-sex
lovers? In addition, how would they respond to several less typical and troubling subcategories of
shunga? Images from these subgenres, including grotesque and violent scenes (Ishigami 2013;
Kazutaka 2013), were integrated with more typical works as part of the contextual materials used
in the focus groups. These were included to see if they provoked debate but passed without
specific comment or controversy. Some other prints generated more conversation. A print of a
woman fantasizing about sex with her absent lover prompted a discussion about the rarity of art
depicting female masturbation. Nevertheless, the overall reaction to the genre as whole, based on
a brief visual analysis of the images, was overwhelmingly positive.
Focus group participants’ initial unprompted responses reflected the curatorial view that shunga
generally celebrates sex, and its aesthetic qualities merit its categorization as art. For almost all
participants, shunga was a completely new subject; shunga also appeared to challenge the public’s
preconceptions of sexually explicit art or pornography. Some individuals felt that sexually explicit
images in the Western tradition are usually misogynistic and lack artistic merit; almost everyone
thought that shunga was different. The evaluation revealed an interesting challenge: shunga does
not represent reality, its images are certainly not unproblematic, and Edo-period Japan was not a
sexual utopia for all. Participants’ responses suggested that there was a risk that without sufficient
context visitors might leave the exhibition with inaccurate, distorted, or idealized views.
48 Stuart Frost

The evaluation highlighted this issue and suggested ways of addressing it. Shunga is a “chatty”
medium in which word and image work together. Some of the language on the prints is una-
shamedly direct and robust, and a selection of translated texts were tested with participants. The
inscriptions did generate more negative responses. A print by Katsukawa Shuncho-, depicting a
man and woman having sex on a veranda, was shown with a translation of the inscription:

Man: If I don’t do it even for half a day, I lose my appetite. This is the ninth time
today. Let’s sleep for a bit, then do it seven or eight times more.
Woman: Ah! It feels like I’m going to faint. Really. Even deeper, up there. . . . That’s
it. I’m going to come again! Ah! Oh!
(Clark et al. 2013, 190–193)

The directness of the language challenged some participants’ initial assessments, as focus
group comments demonstrate: “It is far more shocking. I thought the print was beautiful. I
find that distasteful,” and “it makes it more vulgar … it makes it more male dominated.”
Although some participants found the language unpleasant, to omit translations, as in several
major exhibitions featuring shunga, would have been disingenuous. Historically, the less socially
acceptable subjects addressed in Japanese art and shunga have been elided from exhibitions to make
them more palatable. The use of shunga for self-pleasure, for example, has often been omitted from
interpretive frameworks. Timon Screech states in the introduction to his key text on the genre:
“The reader will have to tolerate discussion of masturbation, for it is the central practice that
accounts for the genres here discussed. It is necessary to stress this point, for recent interpreta-
tions … have been amazingly resistant to analyses of just what erotica was for; use remains the big
encompassing silence” (1999, 7). Exhibitions of Japanese paintings and prints have frequently
focused primarily on the aesthetic qualities of works, overlooking their function or social context.
This distorts visitors’ perceptions of the works and the culture that created them.

Sensitive issues
Shunga includes subgenres that challenge contemporary sensibilities. Some shunga, for example,
depicts violent or coercive sex with images that are abhorrent to contemporary viewers. These
are not typical; they appear late in the tradition and relatively infrequently. Our exhibition
included a print by Kitagawa Utamaro that showed an older man attempting to rape a young
woman. It was one of a series of twelve prints published in 1788, six of which were shown in
the “Masterpieces of Shunga” section of the exhibition (Clark et al. 2013, 196–203, 380). To
omit the scene from the series would be misleading; the same would be true if the text had not
acknowledged that the image depicted an attempted rape. The label therefore translated the
dialogue and stated, “Sexual violence is rare in shunga. Attackers are invariably shown as ugly
and repellent.”
Other images in the exhibition that appeared violent were open to misinterpretation. At
first glance, a scene from a painted handscroll attributed to Katsukawa Shun’ei appears to
show a violent and troubling sexual assault (Clark et al. 2013, 348–349). Interpretation was
crucial: the scene in fact represents the woman’s dream. She is imagining making love to her
partner for the last time before they commit shinju-, love suicide. Suicide was seen as the last
option for couples that society prevented from being together. Love suicides were dramatized
by playwrights of the period and thus a common theme.
 Shunga at the British Museum 49

A short essay in the accompanying catalogue was dedicated to the subject of violence
in shunga (Kazutaka 2013). The question of whether violence in shunga was given suffi-
cient prominence in the exhibition, reflecting its significance in the genre, is a matter for
debate. The desire to represent shunga accurately needed to be balanced against the risk
that a small number of images might have a disproportionate impact, distorting the
bigger picture.
The most potentially significant sensitive issue around the exhibition was related to
the depiction of children in works that show adults having sex. The reasons for their
presence are varied. Sometimes young children are included to represent the desired
result of heterosexual sex in a society where professions were often continued within
families from generation to generation. Sometimes children are included to create a
comic effect – flustered parents are disturbed by an innocent child. On other occasions, children
are present in the capacity of servants. These images reflect a different concept of privacy in the
Edo period. In addition, as in other premodern cultures, sexual activity began earlier than
is legally sanctioned today – a youth was considered sexually mature at the age of four-
teen (Yano 2013, 408). Understandably, issues like these touched on contemporary
anxieties and could have caused complications if not addressed carefully.
In 2009, the UK Coroners and Justice Act was tightened to prohibit the production and
ownership of drawn or painted images of children in sexual situations. Although this legisla-
tion was amended in response to concerns about pedophiles, it could be applied to artworks
in museum collections. Some contemporary art exhibitions have attracted police and media
attention because of the inclusion of images of naked children.8 As a result, we restricted the
number of works depicting children but explored this potentially controversial subject in
more detail in the catalogue (Yano 2013).
The museum was careful to ensure that visitors were fully aware of the contents of the
show to avoid inadvertently causing offense. There was a disclaimer at the exhibition
entrance: “This exhibition contains information and imagery of a sexually explicit nature
that may offend some visitors. Parental guidance is advised for visitors under 16.” A
booklet with a representative selection of images was kept on the ticket desks so that
visitors could make an informed decision before purchasing tickets. Marketing was
designed to communicate exhibition content accurately, but without transgressing
advertising guidelines and regulations. Legal advice was sought, and we consulted the
police to avoid unforeseen complications.
Ultimately, the show occupied two galleries with existing cases, each of which usually holds a
separate free-admission exhibition. The two rooms were divided into eight sections: what is shunga;
early shunga, before 1765; masterpieces of shunga, 1765–1850; was shunga legal; who used
shunga and how; shunga and parody; shunga and the floating world. The final section focused on
shunga and the modern world, exploring the decline of the genre in the early twentieth century.
The length and content of label texts for the 175 works were varied to provide
pacing and minimize visitor fatigue.9 The text aimed to balance aesthetics, socio-
historical context, and meaningful discussion of the scenes. The use of shunga for arousal
and masturbation was acknowledged, but the word pornography was eschewed to avoid
unhelpful anachronistic connotations. The use of words such as masturbation, erection,
and sex workers reflected an intention to avoid coy, obscure, or judgmental terms.
Japanese voices from the period introduced humor and reminded visitors that shunga
represents a fantasy world:
50 Stuart Frost

A foolish couple
copy the shunga
spraining a wrist.
(Anon 1861)10

Summative evaluation and public response

Almost 90,000 people visited the exhibition, more than double the target, and over 10,000
copies of the substantial catalogue were sold. Visitor responses were very enthusiastic, and the
few complaints focused on crowding rather than the sexual explicitness of the exhibits. Media
reviews were also overwhelmingly positive, often focusing on the difficulty of categorizing
shunga (Engelhart 2013; Januszczak 2013). Journalists and art critics are hardly a representative
audience, but their responses provided useful insights, and although numbers are not a good
measure of visitor satisfaction, they do reflect the appeal of the exhibition’s proposition.
The Interpretation Team undertook a comprehensive summative evaluation to provide
a more objective and robust overview (British Museum 2014). The methodology inclu-
ded a tracking and observation study of visitors, over two hundred short exit interviews,
and fifteen in-depth interviews (Frost 2014). Space prevents a longer discussion here, but
the data is indicative of a satisfied and engaged audience. On average, visitors spent
seventy-seven minutes in the exhibition, with 70% staying at least an hour or more. Of
respondents, 95% said they were satisfied or very satisfied, and 96% said it met or
exceeded their expectations. Qualitative feedback confirms that the audience accepted
the curatorial arguments about shunga and that they supported the museum’s decision to
mount the exhibition. The following quotations illustrate how the exhibition encouraged
visitors to compare shunga to Western traditions:

The mutual pleasure and lack of violence is very different from the sexism of Western
pornography.
I think the nice thing about the images is that … they didn’t seem to be derogatory
about women. . . . some of them seemed to focus on woman’s pleasure. . . . It is normally
always about men.
It was probably safe to shy away from describing the prints as “pornographic” or
“erotic” but the intense focus on genitals in action (and the exaggeration of these body
parts) made me want to have this discussion.

That there was little critical or negative feedback is perhaps to be expected since the show’s
marketing and the exhibition’s proposition will have deterred visits from anyone likely to be
offended by sexually explicit art. Nevertheless, the evaluation strongly indicates that society’s
attitudes to sex and sexuality have changed significantly over the last two decades. Some
visitors thought that an exhibition like shunga was overdue. Others felt that the museum
should acknowledge the importance of sex and sexuality to human experience, including
same-sex love and desire, a finding that is reflected in other exhibition evaluations at the
British Museum. This suggests that the museum has lagged behind societal change. Some
comments provided useful insights to consider for future exhibitions.
The interviews suggest that a number of visitors would have preferred for same-sex
relationships to be given more prominence. We received a letter from a visitor who felt
 Shunga at the British Museum 51

that images related to male-male lovemaking had been deliberately omitted. In fact,
somewhere between 10% and 17% of the exhibits depicted or made reference to male-
male relationships. These works were integrated throughout the exhibition, reflecting a
conscious decision to avoid segregating this material. It is possible that in some cases (like
the image in Figure 4.1), visitors simply failed to notice that the lovers were men and
read the accompanying text superficially. The subject of same-sex love in Japan, parti-
cularly involving males, was discussed throughout the exhibition, but the project team
decided to avoid the anachronistic term homosexuality, and this perhaps also led some
visitors to miss references.11
Visitors were asked which objects stood out after their visit was complete. The answers
were entered into Wordle to generate a word cloud. The most prominent word was
octopus, reflecting the impact of one particular print. Pine Seedlings on the First Rat Day by
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) shows a large octopus having sex with a naked woman,
while a smaller octopus kisses her and uses its tentacles to fondle her nipples (Clark et al.
2013, 218–219). The print’s inscription, which was translated in the exhibition, evokes
the woman’s ecstasy. The dominance of this work in the evaluation demonstrates that a
single striking (and not necessarily representative) image among hundreds of others can
have a disproportionate impact on memories and perceptions.

FIGURE 4.1A samurai makes love to a young man, and a woman adjusts their bedding. Opening
scene from a painted scroll with twelve erotic scenes, early 1600s.
Source: Unknown artist. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.
52 Stuart Frost

Recent shunga exhibitions and displays

The impact of Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, the largest exhibition in the UK devoted to
the genre at that point, extended beyond the British Museum’s audiences. A version of the show
was subsequently held at Eisei Bunko in Tokyo, the first major exhibition of shunga in Japan.
Staged in two parts, it featured over 120 shunga works, seventy of which were included in the
British Museum’s display (Clark 2015). The Eisei Bunko exhibition represents an important mile-
stone in changing attitudes to exhibiting shunga in Japan and a significant moment in the ongoing
revaluation of a genre that was widespread before Western influence contributed to its suppression.
The increased academic, curatorial, and public interest in shunga, and in gender and sexuality in
Japanese art more generally, is also reflected in subsequent major exhibitions in Honolulu,
Toronto, and Paris (Eichman and Salel 2014; Mostow and Ikeda 2016; Restellini 2014).12
The Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) 2016 exhibition, A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in
Japanese Prints, differed from the others in this chapter by focusing primarily on images of waka-
shu, male youths with an androgynous appearance. Wakashu were admired and desired by both
men and women and therefore challenge the rigid gender binaries and heteronormative
assumptions common in modern Western societies (Mostow and Ikeda 2016).13 Male-male love
(nanshoku) was also an important theme in ROM’s temporary display. The exhibition included
images of onnagata, male actors who played female parts in kabuki theatre and who were part of
Edo Japan’s sexual economy for both male and female clients.14 The focus on youths inevitably
raised challenges for the curatorial team, since today wakashu would be regarded as minors. As a
result, sexually explicit images of wakashu were excluded from the exhibition, although they
were included in the catalogue, which was “targeted at scholarly audiences” (Mostow and Ikeda
2016). Understandably, museums have often been risk-averse with respect to shunga. Confining
the more challenging subjects and images to publications may sometimes be a necessary com-
promise, but it inevitably implies that only wealthier, more academic audiences are capable of
dealing with them, an echo of nineteenth-century attitudes that led to the creation of secret
museums and private cases.
Visitors’ enthusiastic and thoughtful responses to the shunga exhibition encouraged us to
include examples in later free admission displays, making it accessible to all. The 2017 exhi-
bition Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories was programmed to coincide with the
fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalized homosexuality
in England and Wales. The exhibition consisted of two elements, a small focused exhibition
in a contained display space (Room 69a) and a series of temporary interpretive interventions
highlighting fourteen objects mostly already on permanent display in the galleries (Frost and
Phillips 2017). The latter could be followed as an LGBTQ+ trail, and a leaflet was available
in the exhibition space to help visitors navigate and locate the objects.
The exhibition was inspired by Richard B. Parkinson’s award-winning book, A Little Gay
History – Desire and Diversity around the Globe (2013, 2016).15 This book features forty objects
from the British Museum’s global collection, ranging chronologically from 11,000 years ago to
the present. The trail incorporated two shunga prints depicting same-sex encounters that Par-
kinson included in his book (2013).16 These works, which cannot be on permanent display for
conservation reasons, were temporarily shown in the Japanese galleries. One of the two prints, a
work by Suzuki Harunobu dating from 1770, showed a young male trainee kabuki actor having
sex with a male client. The second print, one of a series in an 1801 book by Cho-kyo-sai Eiri,
showed two women preparing to use a sex toy. Whether the latter scene represents a true lesbian
 Shunga at the British Museum 53

encounter is debated, as it was a fantasy among townspeople that women used dildos in their
secluded quarters in samurai mansions when men were absent.17 The interpretation for these two
objects was added to a vinyl strip applied to the front of the case. This allowed for about two
hundred words of text to supplement the conventional labels. Evaluation of the exhibition
revealed audiences were particularly positive about the trail element and the interventions in the
permanent galleries (TWResearch 2017).18
An expanded version of the Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories exhibition,
including examples of recently acquired shunga, was developed as part of the project’s legacy and
has traveled to four UK museums.19 This demonstrates the ongoing impact and legacy of the ori-
ginal shunga exhibition and illustrates the role that temporary displays can have as catalysts in
prompting new ways of thinking, in this case about cultural attitudes to sex, sexuality, and gender.

Conclusions
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art has had wider, unforeseen impacts at the British Museum
that extend beyond subsequent special exhibitions. Shunga is now used at the museum as part of
Sex and Relationship Education sessions developed by staff and delivered by freelancers to school
students (Rose 2017). Shunga images provide an effective way to open potentially difficult con-
versations about the role of pornography in modern society, encouraging discussion about why
people now and throughout history have made, appreciated, and consumed sexually explicit
imagery. The unique characteristics of shunga make it an effective vehicle for facilitating discus-
sion with young people about the difference between fantasy and reality, and what we can – or
cannot – learn about desire, sex, and love from explicit art and pornography.20
There are encouraging signs that museums and heritage organizations in the UK are
beginning to engage with sex, sexuality, and gender diversity more frequently and more
creatively than ever before (Wellcome 2014). The fact that museums share a history of pas-
sively or actively ignoring these subjects (and sequestering objects that relate to them) means
that there is an increased obligation for the sector to be proactive in addressing them today
and in the future (de Caro 2000; Cross 1991; Frost 2008). Shunga provides an excellent
example of a category of material once considered taboo and undisplayable, which now has
the potential to facilitate important discussions, encouraging the public to reflect actively on
contemporary attitudes to sex, sexuality, and gender.21 In a human rights framework, muse-
ums and art galleries must present and interpret the full breadth and diversity of human
experience and history accurately, honestly, and meaningfully, however challenging it may
(or may not) be for those of us who work there and those who visit.

Notes
1 I am indebted to Timothy Clark at the British Museum for his assistance and expertise. Thanks also to
Louise Boyd, Shelley O’Connor, and David Francis for completing the summative evaluation of
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art. Louise Boyd was particularly generous in sharing her research.
2 The British Museum acquired some shunga in the period leading up to the exhibition (Frost 2015).
The museum’s shunga collection can be accessed via its website, www.britishmuseum.org.
3 The British Museum omitted shunga from its Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave exhibition (2017).
Hokusai’s shunga were produced earlier in his career, not in the later period (1820–49), which was
the show’s focus.
4 The growth of the British Museum’s shunga collection is difficult to establish. Shunga was acquired
between 1865 and 1974, but items were not registered at the time of acquisition and evidence is hard to
54 Stuart Frost

find. The first official acquisition records for shunga date from 1972, when nineteen items were regis-
tered as part of a bequest received that year. In 1974, shunga already in the museum was officially
accessioned as the result of a museum-wide audit that required all unregistered items to be catalogued.
5 The Bodleian Library, Oxford, had a restricted collection that was the focus of a recent small dis-
play, Story of Phi: Restricted Books (2018–19).
6 Shunga featured prominently in The Passionate Art of Utamaro exhibition at the British Museum but
was excluded from the exhibition and catalogue when it toured to Chiba City Art Museum, Japan.
7 The aesthetic qualities of shunga and its sexual explicitness often prompt debate about whether it
should be regarded as art or pornography. For a summary of the major philosophical arguments
about the distinctions between art and pornography, and the extent to which they are – or are
not – fundamentally incompatible categories, see Maes (2011, 2012).
8 For example, a 2007 exhibition of Nan Goldin’s photography at the Baltic Art Gallery, Gateshead,
was canceled after the gallery withdrew a photograph depicting her children following a discussion
with the police. Richard Prince’s Spiritual America 1983, featuring a photograph of a nude Brooke
Shields taken when she was a child, was withdrawn from Tate Modern’s Pop Life: Art in a Material
World (2009–2010), following police advice.
9 Numerous works were rotated halfway through the exhibition for conservation reasons.
10 A member of the curatorial team translated this untitled poem from a shunga print.
11 This extends to the publication that accompanied the exhibition. In the index, “homosexuality
(male),” directs the reader to “male-male” sex (Clark et al. 2013, 529).
12 Another significant exhibition was The Night of Longing: Love and Desire in Japanese Prints, Fitzwil-
liam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2013–2014).
13 The exhibition’s curators defined wakashu as “sexually mature males who were not yet recognized
as adult men” (Mostow and Ikeda 2016, 13).
14 For a fuller discussion, see Ryoko Matsuba (2016).
15 The exhibition was co-curated by Laura Phillips (Head of Community Partnerships) and myself. It
was guided by staff from across the museum and representatives of LGBTQ+ community partners.
Professor Richard B. Parkinson was an external advisor.
16 See Parkinson 2013, 76–77. For other works by Japanese artists in his book, see 66–67, 114–115. The
Desire, Love, Identity exhibition included Drag Queen Deck, a set of playing cards made by Japanese
-
artist and activist Otsuka Takashi (b.1948). More recent acquisitions of modern and contemporary
Japanese works at the British Museum include pieces inspired by shunga (Frost 2015).
17 A version of this print was also included in the Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition
(Clark et al. 2013, 310–311). It was juxtaposed with a set of sex toys in the British Museum’s col-
lection (316–317), including some which resembled those in the image.
18 The author is aware of only one complaint made to the British Museum about the appropriateness
of the display of these two sexually explicit shunga works. The prints were seen by tens of thousands
of visitors from around the world.
19 Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories visited the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2018);
the National Justice Museum, Nottingham (2018–2019); Bolton Library and Museum Service
(2019); as well as Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library (2019).
20 The Wellcome Collection, London, has been particularly active in using its collection to encourage
debate about sex in contemporary society. A collaboration with the University of Exeter and the
Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter, resulted in a 2014 exhibition, Intimate Worlds:
Exploring Sexuality through the Sir Henry Wellcome Collection at the RAAM.
21 The Cool Japan exhibit discussed in the introduction to this book exemplifies these changing atti-
tudes. First shown in Leiden in 2017, the exhibition minimized shunga. When it reappeared in
Amsterdam in 2018, a curtained room was dedicated to shunga and other erotica.
.

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Bru, Ricard. 2013. “The Modern West’s Discovery of Shunga.” In Clark et al., 478–489.
Buckland, Rosina. 2010. Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan. London: British Museum Press.
de Caro, Stefano. 2000. The Secret Cabinet in the National Archaeological Museum. Napoli: Electa.
Clark, Timothy. 2015. “‘Sexhibition’: Reflections on Shunga in London, Looking Forward to Shunga
in Tokyo.” Bunka Shigen Gaku, June 13, 127–136. Bunka Shigen Gakkai: Tokyo University.
Clark, Timothy, ed. 2017. Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave. London: Thames & Hudson.
Clark, Timothy, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, and Akiko Yano, eds. 2013. Shunga: Sex and Pleasure
in Japanese Art. London: British Museum Press.
Crighton, Robin. 1973. The Floating World: Japanese Popular Prints 1700–1900. London: HMSO.
Cross, Paul James. 1991. “The Private Case: A History.” In The Library of the British Museum: Retro-
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Museum Library.
Dalon, Laure, and Nagata Seiji. 2014. Hokusai. Paris: RNM.
Eichman, Shawn, and Stephen Salel. 2014. Shunga: Stages of Desire. New York: Skira Rizzoli.
Engelhart, Katie. 2013. “Does Japanese Shunga Turn Porn into Art?” The Guardian Comment Network,
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japan-art-sex.
Frost, Stuart. 2008. “Secret Museums.” Museums and Social Issues 3(1): 29–40.
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15–17.
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Sexually-Explicit Art.” Social History in Museums 39: 36–44.
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5
ACTIVISTS ON THE INSIDE
The Victoria and Albert Museum LGBTQ Working Group

Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

In the introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader, Amy K. Levin stated,
“despite widely held perceptions of the prevalence of [LGBTQ+] individuals in museum work,
little evidence of their contribution exists” (2010, 3). To address this circumstance, this chapter
shines a light on the multifarious efforts of a small but plucky band of LGBTQ+ workers (and
allies) at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, who have increased the visibility and
accessibility of LGBTQ+ objects and histories within one of the world’s largest decorative arts
museums. In this chapter, we reflect on the efforts of the LGBTQ Working Group to facilitate
understanding of LGBTQ+ identities and histories within the context of the museum. This
includes investigating collections to identify, research, and catalogue LGBTQ+-relevant mate-
rial; providing eclectic public programming; forging operational relationships across the museum;
and building networks with audiences, academics, artists, designers, community groups, and
other LGBTQ+ cultural organizations.
Since the publication of Levin’s 2010 collection, there has been a seismic shift toward
greater inclusion of minority and underrepresented histories in museums. Key motivators for
change include audible public demands, heightened governmental scrutiny, and the field’s
increasingly diverse and outward-looking workforce.
In 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in Eng-
land and Wales prompted many cultural institutions to strive for better inclusion through
celebratory and illuminating exhibitions, relevant publications, and drives to acquire work by
LGBTQ+ artists. While acknowledging this wider surge of activity and increased academic
attention, this chapter is offered as a case study-cum-rough guide of the V&A’s work in this
field, written by two queer curatorial staff members.

Gathering together: “The margins can be a powerful place”

The V&A LGBTQ Working Group was established in 2006 through the efforts of a small
number of colleagues, most notably Oliver Winchester,1 as a “cross-museum group of
interested individuals who sought to engage with issues of sexual identity as one of the newly
emerging curatorial tools with which museum collections may be interrogated” (Winchester
58 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

2012, 143). Originally named the V&A LGBTQ Network, the gathering was always con-
sciously a working group, focused on productive public-facing action rather than on pro-
viding a social network for staff.2 To reflect this emphasis, we renamed ourselves a working
group. The group is open to LGBTQ+ individuals and allies, with no requirement or
expectation for members to reveal their gender or sexual identity. Throughout the years,
individuals from a range of departments have joined; today, members represent the curatorial,
loans, retail, visitor services, and learning departments as well as volunteers. Involvement is
voluntary and undertaken in addition to other duties, so participation is variable and depends
on shifting workloads. Attendance at meetings held in alternate months fluctuates between
approximately three and fifteen people.
Winchester initially aspired to establish a group officially recognized by the museum. This
would mean the group’s ambitions and efforts would be factored into formal institutional
objectives, prompting associated practical support (such as funding). We have regularly
attempted to become aligned with a specific department. However, despite supportive
colleagues, the group currently floats within the institutional structure and operates
without direct funding.
Disadvantages include the lack of institutional strategy to ensure continuity of the group or its
endeavors when key members depart. Managers determine the amount of support individuals
receive for involvement in the group. This can fluctuate greatly and affect members’ ability to
participate. Notably, the absence of funding reduces the extent to which we can work with
potential partners, due to our strong belief in properly remunerating artists and others.
The group’s informal nature also has benefits. As the subtitle quotation implies,3 this
marginal position can be a productive place from which to operate, with limitations
prompting resourcefulness and creativity. Drawn together by a collective drive, we have
functioned as renegade queer comrades, pressing ahead with changes and improvements from
inside the institution. Freed from the need to report on this work immediately to supervisors
or to fit our efforts into restrictive, predetermined departmental targets, we can demonstrate
agility in responding to current events and opportunities. While maintaining professionalism
and on-brand behaviors, we can operate somewhat under the radar (see our approach to
producing our first Out on Display guide below).

Out online and in the collections

In terms of the group’s visibility and ability to communicate with international audi-
ences, an important achievement was the establishment of a permanent presence on the
V&A website. Since September 2014 our blog, Out in the Museum (Victoria and Albert
Museum 2015b), has been a great tool for informing audiences of our activities. It
enables the group to communicate more directly and on a wider range of subjects than
through live events or communications in other formats. As of June 2015, we also have
an LGBTQ+ hub page (Victoria and Albert Museum 2015a). This provides an over-
view of the group; information on finding LGBTQ+-related objects using Search the
Collections online;4 a free download of our Out on Display gallery guide to thirty
LGBTQ+-related objects; a copy of our LGBTQ Terminology Guidelines; information on
past and future events; and a link to the blog. As well as offering useful information and
insights into the group’s motivations, our online queer spaces indicate the museum’s
support for our work.
 Victoria and Albert LGBTQ Working Group 59

Encountering queer histories online or in person can have a significant legitimizing effect
on LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. The encounter can create a “stronger sense of
personal and sexual identity” and develop “a sense of historical community” that builds and
strengthens “a contemporary group identity” (Oram 2001, 44). However, histories and objects
linked to minority identities are particularly subject to fortune, at risk of becoming lost or
inaccessible due to a lack of clear recognition and identification. For these reasons, we have
pursued investigations into the collections to identify relevant material. Our aim is to create
focused catalogue records featuring supportive research, contextual explanation, and
interpretation to increase awareness of and access to objects and histories.5
We approach the collections in terms of LGBTQ+ relevance to allow flexibility in categor-
izing objects. This avoids a frustrating yet persistent insistence on “bed-evidence”6 from some
quarters while navigating around issues of applying contemporary terminology inappropriately
to historic situations. For example, Aubrey Beardsley’s work and accounts of their personality
clearly invite queer readings, yet biographers and academics have searched in vain for concrete
primary evidence to support suggestions that the artist was not heterosexual.
We therefore approach the collection from a variety of angles beyond biographies,
including symbolic subject matter, and do not aim simply to present a roll call outing
LGBTQ+ people. We strive to maintain academic rigor and accuracy and do not reduc-
tively position individuals as “queer icons” or “heroes” (Hayward 2015, 108–110).7 An
eagerness to find queer histories does not take precedence over acknowledgments of what
we do or don’t know. For instance, the V&A owns four prints depicting a fascinating and
controversial figure of transgender interest, the Chevalier D’Eon. At “Unspeakable,” the
London Metropolitan Archives’ LGBTQ History and Archives Conference in 2013, a
breakout session discussed D’Eon’s identity and place in LGBTQ+ history in the face of
contradictory records. Some argued that D’Eon should be claimed as transgender to make
up for a lack of examples from eighteenth-century history. Yet this approach risks
reductive oversimplification, whereas retaining these nuances and ambiguities yields
productive conversations.

Treasure troves: Tagging, terminology, and homoerotic hits

Prior to 2015, with the exception of some HIV- and AIDS-awareness posters and a handful of
contemporary prints, catalogue entries rarely spelled out the LGBTQ+ aspects of objects in ways
that made them searchable. Only three related terms could be found in our cataloguing system’s
controlled glossary of terms: homosexuality, defined simply as “same sex desire”; lesbian, curiously
not relating to women but to a cornice where two smooth edges meet; and cross-dressing, defined
through rambling statements, ending with the dated and troubling description, “an abnormal
desire to dress in clothes of the opposite gender.” These shortcomings spurred us into action.
To include LGBTQ+ histories effectively within a database of more than two million objects,
we adopted a combination of simplified tagging alongside implementation of considered, clar-
ified terminology. One of our proudest achievements for ensuring long-term impact on queer
visibility is this implementation of LGBTQ+ terminology in our collections management system
(CMS). Its controlled-terminology thesaurus now contains twenty-nine pertinent terms,
enabling records to be tagged from a drop-down menu. Tags are quickly applied and facilitate
prompt basic identification of objects. Meanings and usage are clearly explained in accompanying
guidelines, together with contextual information and discussions of sensitive points.8 Accessible
60 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

and clear definitions create familiarity and confidence among colleagues, encouraging them to
use the terms for cataloguing and other tasks. Otherwise, the relevance of these objects to
LGBTQ+ populations might have remained unacknowledged as staff avoided, procrastinated, or
battled with finding appropriate terms and phrasing.
To keep CMS streamlined and user-friendly, we preferred not to overload the system with
excessive or archaic search terms. Thought went into determining which terms covered the
broadest range of identities and how to avoid splitting results by using multiple terms with similar
meanings. A significant number of relevant objects pertaining to a term were a requisite for
inclusion, and selected terms had to endure. We wanted to avoid potentially short-lived terms
such as trans*, which was widely discredited by segments of the community shortly after being
hailed by others. We also introduced two umbrella categories: LGBTQ for overt material, and
Gender & Sexuality as a catch-all. Within these broad categories sit all the objects tagged with one
or more of the twenty-nine more specific LGBTQ+ terms in the system.
When an object’s LGBTQ+ relevance is not immediately obvious, or information is
missing, we aim to insert a paragraph clarifying why we applied an LGBTQ+ tag. We
adopted this strategy to help new audiences to discover artists who have some sort of queer
history, even if the content of their work gives no hint of it. For example, the museum has
several works related to animal painter Rosa Bonheur, so we included an explanatory excerpt
(Lockhart 2002) with the keyword lesbian. Interpreting objects through artists’ biographies
raises questions about how liberally such tags should be applied. Should the record for a print
of a sheep painting by Bonheur include the word lesbian, or does that introduce tenuous
links, diluting the quality and substance of LGBTQ+ search results? Members of the group
must keep an eye on what is being tagged and regularly revisit the website to ensure that
meaningful results emerge. Consequently, queering the museum is a dynamic process, a
circumstance also noted by other contributors to this book.
Nevertheless, LGBTQ+ museum staff and allies have had a particular impact in
approaching the collection with a queer perspective in order to identify objects as being
homoerotic or camp. The decision to employ such subjective descriptors as cataloguing terms
was potentially contentious. Yet in July 2015, shortly after our tagging began in earnest, we
were informed that homoerotic had become the seventh most searched term on the V&A
collections site, suggesting that use of these terms was common among the public and
therefore helpful for those seeking information.9
We gained satisfaction from knowing that we were filling gaps, and that with each object
tagged, we were overcoming the omission of queer narratives. Four years later, with
approximately 1,400 objects tagged, we still have more to discover. However, we have made
headway and have freely shared our terminology guidelines with museums around the
country which are keen to implement similar systems.
An example of objects that have benefited from the application of improved tagging ter-
minology are scrapbooks by Grimsby-born textile designer Eddie Squires (1940–1995).
Before a member of our group discovered the prevalence of drag queens, homoeroticism,
and cruising within the nine scrapbooks, their queer content had not been written into the
records. Demonstrating the intertwining of the personal and the professional, they counter
the argument for a total separation of social or personal details from art and design history.
The books contain science fiction imagery and other ephemera that appealed to Squires
and informed his designs. They also record a queer life in London from the late 1960s to the
early 1990s. Tickets, packages, magazine pages, and Polaroid photographs of friends, family,
 Victoria and Albert LGBTQ Working Group 61

and lovers are pasted among illustrations and notes in thickly bound, chronological books. A
page of photographs depicts a leather and denim night at the Coleherne, the (now closed)
gay pub in Earl’s Court; a series of shots of Eddie and a friend cruising by a river; and
magazine collages of androgynous models, including figures like Divine, Barbarella, Grace
Jones, and David Bowie. Since the queer content of the Squires scrapbooks was publicized
with a short blog and two lectures in 2013, they have been more regularly requested in the
Prints and Drawings Study Room and have featured in the V&A touring exhibition, You Say
You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970.

Out in the galleries and on display

With an increasing plethora of queer objects recorded on CMS, we became disheartened by the
low LGBTQ+ visibility in gallery texts, counting fewer than five labels explicitly mentioning
LGBTQ+ content (around sixty thousand objects are on display). While acknowledging the
limitations imposed by label word limits and the requirement to focus on design and technique,
with respect to LGBTQ+ histories in the galleries, we found the message was primarily one of
“silence, omission and assumptions” (Smith 2017, 363). With the support of Matt Smith (V&A
Artist in Residence, author of the following chapter), we conducted a queer label audit of the
permanent galleries and created a shortlist of labels that should and could reference LGBTQ+
histories. Working with interpretation and curatorial departments, we instigated changes to a
dozen labels. In some cases, this involved the addition of just one word (for instance, Leigh
Bowery being described as a “queer designer”); in others, we ensured that visitors knew what they
were seeing (for instance, instead of referring to “this group,” a label now explicitly states that a
Rodin sculpture depicts two nude women embracing).
In June 2014 (coinciding with London Pride), we launched Out on Display, a booklet on
fourteen LGBTQ+-related objects. This self-led and freely accessed guide aimed to highlight
the presence of LGBTQ+ histories. Frustrated by the slow pace of official museum processes
and competing for resources to produce printed guides, we forged ahead to write, design,
print, and staple them ourselves. We shared drafts with relevant curatorial and interpretation
colleagues and received supportive feedback. Within hours of the museum’s opening, two
hundred copies had flown off the front desk. The eye-catching cover, featuring a Jean
Cocteau fabric design, could be seen in the hands of a variety of visitors.
The guide offered a sample of the LGBTQ+-related objects and stories in the galleries,
and we made a conscious attempt to include populations representing all the acronym letters.
Topics comprised Hadrian’s love for the Greek youth Antinous, with a coin from circa AD
118 depicting the emperor; the origins of the terms sapphic and lesbian in relation to an early
nineteenth-century pendant depicting Sappho; and notions of masculinity and femininity in
an entry on a Kushan sculpture of Shiva as Ardhanarishvara (Lord Who Is Half Woman). For
the “Queer & Now” Friday Late (February 2015), we were able to expand and redesign the
booklet, distributing another two hundred hard copies and offering a free download.10 In
2017, we refreshed it again and increased the content to thirty objects.

Award-winning volunteer guides

Monthly LGBTQ+ volunteer-led gallery tours were added to the permanent schedule in
April 2015, ostensibly a first in a major London museum. Inclusion on the permanent tour
62 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

schedule requires an indication that there is an audience and a commitment from guides to
offer the tours on the last Saturday of every month. Lead instigator Dan Vo (Volunteer
Ambassador), pointed to “Out on Display” and the “Queer & Now” Friday Lates as
inspirations for the tours. A team of interested guides helped select appropriate objects for the
forty-five-minute tours. A number of “must-sees” were agreed upon collectively, but guides
add selections reflecting their areas of expertise and personal preferences. We hope that these
personal angles encourage visitors to feel more confident in reading and responding to objects
on their own terms. It is a credit to the guides’ passion and enthusiasm that the program has
been possible, and their work has won awards.11 The attendance figures speak for themselves,
with over one hundred people turning up for the inaugural tour and subsequent events
clocking in at forty to sixty people.
Conscious of those unable to visit the museum, in February 2017, we joined with the
British Newspaper i to broadcast our first live Facebook tour, presented by volunteers and
curatorial staff. The recording remains available online (i 2017) and has been viewed over
twelve thousand times. It helped to expand the geographical spread of our audience and to
raise awareness of LGBTQ+ inclusivity in the heritage sector. The recording also notably
provided a means of inclusion for individuals who were more comfortable accessing such
content in private (be it for social, psychological, or safety concerns).

Events and programming

LGBT History Month

We aim to provide free (or affordable) LGBTQ+ programming year-round. LGBT History
Month remains a stalwart in the events roster. Since February 2007, our group has offered a day
of free programs every year, linking up on two occasions with the national organization Outing
the Past12 to curate more extensive daytime events. We provide public activities within the gal-
leries but also utilize more intimate spaces. Content comes from staff, volunteers, external
speakers, artists, and performers.13 Programs include talks by colleagues on artists with work in
the collections: for instance, Constance Spry, Denton Welch, Derek Jarman, Erté, and Philippe
Jullian. Poet Catherine Brogan has explored fourth-century queer folklore within the stories of
St. Catherine, Ganymede, and Hypatia. We have examined lesbian desire in nineteenth-century
sculpture with Dr Amy Mechowski; sexual fluidity in the eighteenth century with Dr Danielle
Thom; and historical trans and lesbian overlaps in readings of works by Bryher with Dr Jana
Funke. Sara Davidmann’s film Ken. To Be Destroyed explored archives of a deceased relative’s
hidden transition (also discussed in chapter 1 of this volume); and Veronica McKenzie’s doc-
umentary Under Your Nose (2015) illuminated histories of queer people of color and activism in
1980s London. Queer femme performance artist Bird la Bird has created three original perfor-
mative works for LGBT History Month events, including “A Swish Around the V&A,” a gallery
tour which generated the following feedback:

I’ve been to some of your fabulous exhibitions … but I’ve not been drawn to the rest of
the museum’s collection. That all changed on Saturday, after I saw Bird’s tour in an
inclusive and accessible community event.
What is so powerful about Bird’s approach is her ability to re-contextualize histories
and recognize that the past is not simply one voice - usually that of the dominant class -
 Victoria and Albert LGBTQ Working Group 63

but that it includes (and sadly frequently omits) other voices too … voices [which] many
people on the tour felt able to relate to.14

This comment demonstrates how we can expand people’s assessments of the museum and
reinforces the powerful effect of bringing groups of LGBTQ+ people together.

Friday Lates
On the last Friday of the month, the museum stays open until 10 pm and presents a free,
themed program throughout the building. Celebrating all aspects of contemporary visual
culture and design, these events have had an increasingly strong focus on LGBTQ+ and
BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) artists. In particular, three LGBTQ+-themed Friday
Lates have been curated by members of the working group: “Making a Scene” in 2009,
“Queer & Now” in 2015 (Hoskin 2015) and “Out for Revolution” in 2017.
These eclectic events explored the collections and provided platforms for LGBTQ+ indi-
viduals and artists, speakers, and performers, such as performance creator Tom Marshman;
artist, musician, and poet Black Cracker; and Salon Outré, a collective of dance, choral, and
spoken word performers. The support for and inclusion of contemporary artists presents the
museum as an active space where LGBTQ+ voices are recognized as having relevance and
agency. The presence of popular artists also leads audiences to regard museums as accessible
shared resources that offer contemporary relevance and inspiration. Even when a Friday Late
theme is not explicitly related to LGBTQ+ concerns, the curatorial team incorporates

FIGURE 5.1 Rubyyy Jones at the “Queer & Now” Friday Late in February 2015
Source: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
64 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

inspired and diverse programming featuring queer, trans, or nonbinary artists. For example,
for September 2018’s event, “(De)constructed Masculinities,” eight out of eleven activities
were presented by LGBTQ+ individuals. Thus, we have witnessed an increased number of
LGBTQ+ events and displays which have not been instigated by our working group.

Being Human festival

Funding from Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities,15 led by the School of Advanced
Study, University of London, allowed us to work with (and pay) artists and performers to
develop two notable events. In 2015, “An Armchair Tour of the ‘Queer People’s Knick
Knack Emporium’” with performer Bird la Bird took place in the Lecture Theatre and
combined live performance with film sequences recorded around the museum at night. We
selected this format in part because of the overwhelming numbers attending her previous
tour and also to increase accessibility for mobility, sight, and hearing-impaired individuals.
Bird identified several individuals associated with the collections (as portrait subjects or
previous owners of works) who were connected with imperial regimes and homophobic
nineteenth-century legislation. Presented in Bird’s inimitable compelling yet entertaining
style, this event created further space for critical discussions regarding the intersections of
museums’ histories with homophobia, racism, and British colonialism.
Development of our 2016 Being Human event, “Following in the Footsteps of Vernon
Lee,” was prompted by the discovery that queer writer and theorist Vernon Lee had deliv-
ered lectures at the V&A in 1895. Part lecture, part performance, our event took place in the
theater where they lectured. Drawing on Lee’s studies in psychological aesthetics, content
was collectively developed with Dr Francesco Ventrella (University of Sussex) and The
Drakes, “a group of butches, transmen, and masculine-identified people who joined together
in the spirit of masculine solidarity” (The Butch Monologues 2018).
This exploration of art appreciation, gender identity, and desire within museum spaces
allowed further consideration of the intangible and emotional aspects of encountering traces
of LGBTQ+ figures of the past within particular spaces. The event’s multidisciplinary con-
tent brought together a varied audience with interests in nineteenth-century art theory,
museology, musicology, gender theory, and lesbian history. Crucially, it increased the visibility
of LGBTQ+ narratives within diverse spheres of academic interest, while demonstrating that
LGBTQ+-focused programming can have broad, intersectional appeal.

Activism and agency of the queer museum worker

Through museum programming, we have been able to support activist groups, including
Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants and the African Rainbow Family, inviting them to
represent themselves at various events. We both have backgrounds in environmental and
LGBTQ+ activism and feel strongly that institutions and activists need not be opposed;
rather, their relationship can prompt positive change in a human rights framework.
There are distinctions between activist ambitions that lie beyond museums and those that
are targeted at museums. However, in both cases, activists can be present within the museum
not only in terms of the physical building but also within the staffing structure. Recognition
of this appears to be gaining traction, as evidenced by the theme of the 2018 Museums
Association annual conference: “Dissent: inspiring hope, embracing change - having the
 Victoria and Albert LGBTQ Working Group 65

courage to challenge traditional thinking to transform museums and society” (Museums

Association 2018). It is hard to measure the direct impact of LGBTQ+ activism targeted at
museums; however, the increased reach of online activists means that institutions are
increasingly conscious that their actions (or lack thereof) are observed, questioned, and pub-
licly challenged. In other words, the very existence of networks of activists – quite apart from
their work – instigates change.
The queer museum worker is an activist from within. Levin’s assertion that little evi-
dence exists of contributions of past LGBTQ+ museum workers prompted us to consider
our possible predecessors and to reflect on what our position and actions as self-identified
queer and trans workers within the museum might mean, both personally and in terms
of the V&A more broadly. Current and past LGBTQ+ staff members have lived and
worked with different levels of visibility and openness. Carl Winter (appointed Assistant
Keeper in the Department of Engraving, Illustration, and Design, and the Department of
Paintings in 1931) was one of only three gay men who gave evidence to the Wolfenden
Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.16 Moreover, Sir Roy Strong
(Director, 1973–1987) observed in his autobiography: “If I had been born in 1945 and
not in 1935, I should probably have lived the life of a gay man in a society which by
1980 accepted such orientation” (2013, 107). Many other staff members may have
remained closeted but quietly queered the collections over the years by acquiring works
of LGBTQ+ interest.
Today, statistical information about the diversity of the workforce is gathered by Human
Resources, but it provides no indication of what it means for staff to be LGBTQ+ within the
museum. We must avoid simplistic and misleading assumptions about being able to identify
individuals at first glance or the significance of these identities on their personal experiences
and concerns. Some LGBTQ+ staff have little or no interest in exploring or supporting the
group’s work. Conversely, many heterosexual, cisgender colleagues produce passionate and
high-quality LGBTQ+-related work. That is why we are open to allies, and no member
need declare their identity. While this approach supports an inclusive, productive environ-
ment, we (the authors) have more recently been challenging ourselves with questions
including:

 How do we ensure our visibility as LGBTQ+ museum workers?

 Do we have a responsibility to declare our sexual or gender identity?
 Does our LGBTQ+-focused work “speak for itself”?
 What value or benefit can our LGBTQ+ identities bring to our work?

The tangible effects of these discussions include an acute awareness of how connecting
with LGBTQ+ histories can be incredibly important to an individual’s sense of self and
belonging.
Passion for our subject helps us to find time to invest in historical research, while personal
experience and awareness help us recognize the emotional labor often exerted by LGBTQ+
collaborators. Acknowledging our LGBTQ+ identities when communicating with audiences
can inspire personal connections and recognition that the museum is not a faceless monolith
but consists of many diverse individuals. It conveys our personal investment in exploring and
sharing this subject matter, challenging perceptions of museum staff as “gatekeepers” actively
monitoring and restricting access to knowledge.
66 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

Trans curatorship: Reflections from Zorian

I (Zorian Clayton) am not aware of any trans curators who preceded me – this would be a
difficult fact to ascertain. When I uncover trans and non-binary artists in the collection, I am
stretching out my hand to those who have gone before, to ensure they do not have their
desired names or pronouns ignored posthumously.
A good example is the case of Anton Prinner, a Hungarian printmaker and sculptor who
moved to Paris in the 1920s and transitioned to become male. Briefly associated with the
heady coteries of Picasso, André Breton, and Jacques Prévert, Prinner’s nicknames included
“the small man who makes large statues” and “Monsieur Madame.” While the latter comes
across as highly pejorative today, the former epithet recognizes Prinner’s gender identity.
Regressive researchers from the past decade have insisted on using female pronouns to
describe Prinner, using inflammatory phrases such as “the artist posed as a man” (Dufau 2012)
or “maintained an androgynous identity” (Zalewski 2010).
When I discovered a single print by Prinner in the V&A collection, I realized that who-
ever had catalogued it on arrival in 1939 had struggled in deciding which first name to use.
Sidestepping the issue, the person who compiled the card in the index system (which is
usually thorough) omitted any first name and misspelled the surname as Primer. My indig-
nation over these errors is driven by my own identity and concern over the way we trans
individuals often lose control over our identities after death. Therefore, in addition to
updating the card index, I photographed the print, expanded the catalogue record, and wrote
a blog about Prinner for the V&A website (Clayton 2016). The blog has since appeared as
the second hit in Google search results for the artist’s name. This visibility led to two offer-
ings of works by Prinner to the museum and the acquisition of a 1946 print book by the
National Art Library. Such discoveries of out trans artists from the early twentieth century are
still rare in our work, but I hope to increase the count further.

Conclusion: We’re not alone

The visibility and continuity of the working group with its myriad activities and curatorial
interventions means that colleagues know who best to approach for advice, ideas, and
information. We support and encourage their growing confidence in addressing LGBTQ+
subjects and have been invited to participate in meetings regarding LGBTQ+ inclusion in
exhibitions, staff training, and employee policymaking.
Externally, we have established and maintained productive links with cultural institu-
tions, artists, and academics who are actively including and embedding LGBTQ+ narra-
tives to a greater extent than ever before. Members of our working group belong to the
steering committee for the London LGBTQ Collections Network for queer museum
workers and allies. The network has hosted two symposia; it also allows members to
maintain the momentum and share event plans.17 Through this activist network, we have
demonstrated unity, marching together in London Pride as LGBTQ GLAM (Galleries,
Libraries, Archives, and Museums) for the last three years, generously funded by the
Museums Association. The working group additionally helped establish the Exhibition
Rd LGBTQ+ Network, a social and networking group for the institutions in the vicinity
of South Kensington, including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and
Imperial College London.
 Victoria and Albert LGBTQ Working Group 67

Oliver Winchester lived to see many of these changes, which were in whole or in part
instigated by his contributions to the group. In his 2013 account of the group’s early work,
Winchester quoted the museum’s founder, Sir Henry Cole, and his wish that the museum
would be “like a book with its pages always open and not shut” (2012, 153). While some of
these pages remain blurred, incomplete, inaccurate, missing, or yet to be written, over the
past twelve years, the working group that was close to his heart has made great gains in
opening the book up for examination with an LGBTQ+ lens.
Winchester noted a primary concern that the public program is “only as good as the next
curator” (144) and that LGBTQ+ inclusion and provision can lapse depending on who is in
a post and that person’s level of interest in the subject. Efforts to embed our aims more
deeply within the museum’s operations as well as within the profession are continuing. They
are aided by supportive colleagues and an increasingly vocal public which will call out
omissions and oversights around minority inclusion through social media and other platforms.
Shifts are promising, with decreasing reliance on LGBTQ+ staff to advocate and instigate
inclusion, as evident in the Friday Late programming, for example.
Since 2015, the rainbow flag flying above the museum has become a recurring feature of
LGBT History Month, London Pride weekend, and other events. This visible symbol creates
an impression that the V&A is a place where LGBTQ+ individuals are accepted, respected,
welcomed, and celebrated. As curatorial staff within a museum of art and design, we
instinctively question what lies beneath such decorative surfaces. While it is uplifting to see
the flag flying, it is also a reminder to remain vigilant and active; to ensure it is not an empty
gesture or rainbow fig leaf; to confirm that there is substance to its symbolism and systematic
institutional commitment behind those fluttering colors.

Notes
1 Then Assistant Curator. Winchester passed away in 2017, and we honor his memory by recogniz-
ing his enormous contribution to LGBTQ+ inclusion in London museums.
2 This is different from many other museum and gallery groups, such as the one at Tate Galleries,
which primarily formed as social networks.
3 Promotional material for Edgy: The 16th LGBTQ+ History and Archives Conference London Metro-
politan Archives (December 1, 2018), proposes that: “The margins can be a powerful place rather
than a place of exclusion. But what happens when people get excluded from mainstream memory
through lack of resources or time?”
4 See https://collections.vam.ac.uk/.
5 Chapter 16 in this volume discusses a similar effort in Norway.
6 A practice from which heterosexual people are often exempt, added to the heteronormativity of the
assumption of heterosexuality until “proven” otherwise.
7 See the discussion of the effects of emphasizing celebrities in chapter 22.
8 The UCLA Gender Center terminology list was most useful. Chapter 23 in this book describes a
glossary at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands.
9 Results of a search for homoerotic items would include designs by Anthony Holland, possibly for
an all-male revue; mid-twentieth-century physique shots discovered in a box labeled “life drawing
studies”; statuettes of Hercules and Antaeus wrestling; a German AIDS awareness poster from 1991
depicting a Tom of Finland lifeguard; and works by David Hockney, Simeon Solomon, Pierre et
Gilles, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others.
10 See www.vam.ac.uk/info/lgbtq.
11 Marsh Trust Award for Museum Learning in London (2016); Bringing Innovation, London Volun-
teers in Museums Awards (2016); Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Ambassadors of the
Year (2017).
68 Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin

12 This celebration links mini-festivals, presentations, and performances at numerous venues. Content is
selected from a list compiled by the LGBT History Month team. See http://www.outingthepast.org.uk/.
13 Past programs are available online; see https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/lgbtq.
14 Feedback received via email, March 2014.
15 See https://beinghumanfestival.org/.
16 Held by the National Archives at Kew, LCO 2/5762, the report led to the partial decriminalization
of sex between adult males.
17 Members include the British Museum, the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Jewish
Museum.

References
The Butch Monologues. 2018. “The Company.” http://www.thebutchmonologues.com/the-compa
ny.html.
Clayton, Zorian. 2016. “The Metamorphosis of Anton Prinner.” V&A Blog, August 2. https://www.
vam.ac.uk/blog/caring-for-our-collections/the-metamorphosis-of-anton-prinner.
Dufau, Sophie. 2012. “Re-Discovering the Lost Work of Émile Savitry.” Mediapart, October 26. http
s://www.mediapart.fr/content/re-discovering-lost-work-emile-savitry.
Hayward, Claire Louise. 2015. Representations of Same-Sex Love in Public History. PhD dissertation.
Kingston University, England.
Hoskin, Dawn. 2015. “Queer & Wow.” V&A Blog, March 6. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum
-life/queer-wow.
i. 2017. “V&A LGBTQ Tour.” February 26. https://www.facebook.com/theipaper/videos/
1377882845605673/.
Levin, Amy K., ed. 2010. Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader. Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge.
Lockhart, Ray Ann. 2002. “Rosa Bonheur.” http://www.glbtqarchive.com/arts/bonheur_r_A.pdf.
London Metropolitan Archives. 2018. “Edgy: The 16th LGBTQ+ History and Archives Conference.”
Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/events/2072987989686565/.
Museums Association. 2018. “Dissent: Inspiring Hope, Embracing Change.” https://www.museumsa
ssociation.org/conference/02052018-dissent-inspiring-hope-embracing-change.
Oram, Alison. 2001. “Telling Stories about the Ladies of Llangollen.” In Re-Presenting the Past: Women
and History, edited by Ann-Marie Gallagher, Cathy Lubelska, and Louise Ryan, 44–62. Harlow,
Essex: Pearson Education.
Smith, Matt. 2017. “Queering the Museum.” In The Ceramics Reader, edited by Andrew Livingstone
and Andrew Petrie, 363–372. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Strong, Roy. 2013. Self-Portrait as a Young Man. Oxford: Bodleian Library.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2015a. “LGBTQ.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/lgbtq.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2015b. “Out in the Museum.” V& A Blog. https://www.vam.ac.uk/
blog/out-in-the-museum.
Vo, Dan. 2015. “Why the V&A Gay and Lesbian Tour is Essential.” V&A Blog, April 23. https://
www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/why-the-va-gay-and-lesbian-tour-is-essential.
Winchester, Oliver. 2012. “A Book With its Pages Always Open?” In Museums, Equality and Social
Justice, edited by Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale, 142–155. New York: Routledge.
Zalewski, Leanne M., ed. 2010. Hungarian Modernism. New York: Shepherd & Derom Galleries. http://
www.shepherdgallery.com/pdf/hungariancatalog.pdf.
6
REMOLDING THE MUSEUM
In Residence at the V&A

Matt Smith

In 2015–2016, I was Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in
London.1 The V&A’s website describes the institution as “the world’s leading museum of
art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects” (V&A
2018a), including “some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture,
fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts,
Asian art and design, theatre and performance” (2018a). My first job after leaving uni-
versity was as an administrator in the Conservation Department at the V&A, and I have a
deep love for the museum and its collections. I was therefore very interested in its resi-
dency program, which would allow me to return to the museum years later, as an artist
rather than an administrator.
Since 2009, the residency program has provided a fully equipped studio within the Ceramics
Galleries at the museum. The selection process is open and includes an application form, pre-
sentation, and interview. In addition to creating new work in response to the museum and its
collections, the residency includes an element of public outreach – usually in collaboration with
the museum’s Education Department. During the application process, artists are asked which
groups they would be most interested in working with. I explained that I was happy to engage
with any audience groups (including families, adults, and schools) as long as they identified as
LGBTQ+. I was not being difficult; I wished to find out whether, and if so how, the museum
might need to alter its offer to accommodate LGBTQ+ audiences.
This was a relatively risky strategy. In 2007 Jack Gilbert wrote that most museums and
galleries were failing to “collect, frame and interpret the lives and experience of LGBT
people … not necessarily because individual staff are homophobic but because of institutional
failure” (2007, 19). In 2015, when I was interviewing for the residency, some progress had
occurred, but it was 2017 that saw a massive increase in queer programming in England to
mark fifty years since the partial decriminalization of homosexuality.
In my artistic practice, I have been exploring how museums privilege some histories (usually
white, heterosexual, and male) and marginalize most others. This has led to exhibitions including
Queering the Museum at Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries (2010–2011), Other Stories at the
Stanley and Audrey Burton Art Gallery at the University of Leeds (2012), and Unravelling the
70 Matt Smith

National Trust (2012–2015). Each of these explored – in different ways – how marginalized
histories could be embedded within interpretation in cultural organizations.
For my research strategy, I was interested in queering the V&A in as many ways as possi-
ble. At times, this meant LGBTQ+ visibility; at others, I took a much broader definition of
queer, following David Halperin’s (1995, 62) proposition that queer is by definition whatever
is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to
which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer” then, demarcates not
a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to
lesbians and gay men.
Queer therefore has the potential to explore and expose hierarchies and norms that privi-
lege certain people and ways of being over others, and these privileges intrigued me. This
wider definition of queer, as “differing from what is usual or ordinary; odd; singular; strange”
(Collins English Dictionary 2018) opens out the concept of queer and provided numerous
potential strategies to adopt while at the museum.
As an artist, I was particularly curious about how the museum collections represent – or
don’t represent – people. Unlike historic houses, where the family tree and personal narra-
tives often form the backbone of interpretation, art museums have traditionally divorced the
personal from the object. Objects, upon entering the museum, are usually distanced from the
emotional connections with those who made or owned them and moved into the museum’s
own taxonomies of material, geographical provenance, or date of manufacture. I wanted to
create links among people, identities, and the collections, bringing emotion back into the
displays. As a result, during the residency, I created two new bodies of work, collaborated
with two LGBTQ+ groups, and redisplayed objects from the museum’s collections twice, all
of which will be discussed below.

A 31 Note Love Song

In addition to wishing to return to the V&A as an artist, I had a long-held desire to investigate
some of the former factory sites in Stoke-on-Trent. Traditionally the heartland of England’s
ceramic production, the area has had mixed fortunes, and a number of closed factories remain.
One of these – the former Spode factory – is partly used by the British Ceramics Biennial, but
it still includes warehouses containing now-redundant industrial plaster molds.
I was granted access to the warehouses by Stoke-on-Trent city council, which is redeve-
loping the site and allowed me to take thirty-one molds to work with at the V&A. This was
easier said than done – while many of the molds are from relatively recent tableware pro-
duction, there are areas in the warehouses which feel as though they have been untouched
for decades. With no power for lighting in the warehouses, searching through the molds
involved a bit of guesswork and luck. I found molds to cast parts of figurines and tableware,
but never all the molds needed to recreate a complete object.
This piecing together of objects from disparate elements seemed oddly relevant for a museum
queering. Halberstam (2011, 146) describes “gay and lesbian history as a repressed archive and the
historian as an intrepid archaeologist digging through homophobic erasure to find the truth.”
This sifting through material, according to Robert Mills (2010, 86), means that queer history
exhibitions will necessarily adopt a “style of presentation partly modelled on scrapbooks and
collage; in place of the representative ‘object,’ they will appropriate fragments, snippets of gossip,
speculations, irreverent half-truths … with exhibits that self-consciously resist grand narratives
 In Residence at the V&A 71

FIGURE 6.1 A 31 Note Love Song (detail), Black Parian, 2015. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Source: Photography by Sylvain Deleu © Matt Smith.

and categorical assertions [and which recognize] that interpretations change and that our
encounters with archives are saturated with desire.”
Back at the V&A, and inspired by the black portrait busts created by Wedgwood in the
1780s (V&A 2018b, 2018c), I cast ceramic fragments from the molds by pouring in black
liquid clay (slip). This created parts of thirty-one disparate objects which I joined together
into different forms to create a six meter long body of objects in black Parian and porcelain
clay.
This long collection of objects had a bittersweet quality – celebrating the skilled work of
the potteries, but also mourning the loss of jobs and skills. When gathered together, the
visual undulations of the black objects reminded me of sheet music, and therefore I asked
composer Dimitrios Skyllas whether he would create a composition in response to the work.
Skyllas’s Abyss provided an aural interpretation to pair with my visual response to the lack of
workers in the Spode Factory and the silence that remained in their absence. It had its pre-
miere in the museum’s Europe Galleries in the Autumn of 20162 surrounded by the
“appropriated fragments” which made up the final artwork.

When all is equal

The second body of work came out of my thinking about hierarchies and the visual lan-
guages used to signify privilege. In the Ceramics Galleries, a series of ceramic plinths caught
my eye. The figures made for the plinths were displayed beside them so that they could fit
within the shelf height. While bases often form part of ceramic figure groups, they are usually
a core part of the object. To see stand-alone ceramic plinths is less common. Plinths are not
ubiquitous only within the museum; public sculptures often use plinths to elevate figures of
72 Matt Smith

famous people both physically and, in terms of status, figuratively. Within the V&A’s col-
lections, a number of bronze sculptures are elevated on plinths, adopting the language of
public sculpture (V&A 2018d). I was allowed access to the museum’s bronze store and was
shown around by the curator, Peta Motture. I discussed the use of plinths to elevate the
status of figures. Motture explained that with bronzes, plinths were usually used to stabilize
objects that could not support themselves or stand unaided.
Plinths can therefore be seen to have conflicting roles: sometimes as a tool of the establish-
ment and at other times a prop for the vulnerable. I was interested in this double and contra-
dictory role. I decided to make my own plinths in the studio and use them to elevate objects.
At the V&A’s storage in West London is a large archive from Edward Barnard and Sons, sil-
versmiths. The archive consists of metal casting models used to create elaborate silverware cen-
terpieces and tableware. The large archive also comprises base metal figures, handles, and mounts
which could be adapted and combined to create molds for silver-casting (Eatwell 2013). In a
way, this archive was the “positive” of the “negative” molds that I had found at the former
Spode factory site. The Barnard and Sons objects, which share an acquisition number, fall
somewhere in status between unique museum objects and a reference collection. This uncertain
status seemed well suited for my work, and I was allowed to take casts of some objects.
To question hierarchies further, I also cast from the lowliest of ceramic objects – the
charity shop leftover. The new objects I made based on these casts are an exploration of what
happens when casts of objects from the museum’s collections are brought together with casts
of unloved charity shop finds and the distinctions between high and low values are blurred.

FIGURE 6.2 When All Is Equal, Black Porcelain, 2016. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Source: Photography by Sylvain Deleu © Matt Smith.
 In Residence at the V&A 73

The final works were shown in the Ceramics Galleries with the original ceramic plinths that
inspired the new work and bronzes on plinths from the museum’s collections.

Opening doors
As previously mentioned, in addition to creating new work, the residency involved outreach.
The first group I worked with was Opening Doors, which consists of older LGBTQ+ indi-
viduals who meet regularly in London and participate in activities ranging from film screen-
ings and museum visits to walking tours and dances. In response to the V&A’s exhibition of
Julia Margaret Cameron photographs, nine people from Opening Doors’ Out in Art group
spent three days with me exploring the museum, playing with photography, and learning
more about Victorian photographic processes.
As an icebreaker, I asked each of the participants to bring in an object that had personal
significance to them. Items ranged from a ring to a family photograph album and a small
wooden elephant. I was unprepared for how generous and honest the group members were
in sharing some of their histories and how the linking of personal histories and emotion to
objects brought those objects to life.
While the group was in the museum, they were also given an LGBTQ+ tour by Zorian
Clayton who, along with Dawn Hoskin, was running the LGBTQ+ working group at the
museum (see chapter 5 for information on the group). After the tour, a member of the Out
in Art group commented that while they enjoyed the tour, they were disappointed that the
LGBTQ+ narratives had not made it onto the interpretation labels and instead needed to be
overlaid, either through tours or information sheets.
I decided to test the truth of this and spent my lunch hours searching the museum for labels that
mentioned LGBTQ+ lives. I started my residency at the museum just as the Alexander McQueen
retrospective Savage Beauty and Horst: Photographer of Style were finishing. In my reading of these
shows, the queer sexuality of McQueen and Horst was silenced, so I was interested in how the
museum dealt with LGBTQ+ interpretation in its permanent collections. I managed to find two
labels in the museum that mentioned LGBTQ+ lives. One was a Tom of Finland stamp from 2014,
and the other was Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do poster from 1989. Based
on these labels, LGBTQ+ experience as presented by the museum could be summarized as con-
sisting of pornography and STDs. I strongly believe that, as a publicly funded organization, the
museum has a responsibility to reflect all taxpayers, including queer ones. There is a wealth of
LGBTQ+ material in the museum, as Dan Vo’s tours (Vo 2015) and tweets make abundantly clear,
but this information was not getting as far as labeling. The conversations between the museum staff
and I led to meetings to discuss a program of relabeling key objects. Leigh Bowery’s costumes which
Mr Pearl made for the Michael Clark ballet Because We Must (V&A 2018e) – arguably the queerest
objects ever made both on account of the sequined jockstrap and their relationship to three queer
creatives – have since been relabeled, but much work remains to be done.
On the last day together, the Out in Art group and I went to Four Doors, a photography
studio in Bethnal Green. With the help of Almudena Romero, we took portraits of each of
the group members on tin plates and developed them in the darkrooms at the studio. This
wet collodion process was used by Julia Margaret Cameron and produces a very specific,
beautiful image. The final images were shown at the V&A to tie in with the National Fes-
tival of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Trans History in February 2016. The label with the
74 Matt Smith

photographs explained that they were of an LGBTQ+ group. With just one label, we
temporarily increased the LGBTQ+ labeling in the museum by 50%.
Working with the group changed my perspective. According to the Opening Doors website,
older LGBTQ+ people are three times more likely to be single and live on their own than their
heterosexual counterparts. They are also more likely to be estranged from their families. While I
had hoped the group would produce great results, I was unprepared for how much energy and
what great social lives they had – in part due to the work of Opening Doors.

Rainbow Families
The second outreach project during my residency involved working with Rainbow Families,
a Brighton-based3 social group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning parents
and their children. In the initial conversations with Rainbow Families, the group explained
how they were often asked to be the “alternative family” for television documentaries,
and we discussed how we could make the experience of their family visit to the V&A as
tailored and comfortable as possible.
Working with the Learning Team at the museum, we produced a family trail that
consciously avoided limiting notions of families as always being headed by two-parent,
heterosexual couples. We also talked about how the families perceive themselves and
how they might visually represent themselves. We chose to do this in two different ways.
First, we held a series of clay workshops in which the families were encouraged to make
three-dimensional portraits of themselves based on the Staffordshire flatback figure
groups4 in the museum’s collections. These families included DJ mums and an elephant.
Second, we commissioned a photographer to take family portraits in the museum – a request
that came from the families. I suggested that we commission photographer Pat Pope to take
these images. Pope has a long-running practice of taking “Alt. Portraits” – family photo-
graphs that are backlit and have a vaguely menacing air. With tongue very firmly in cheek,
we merged the media’s desire to present the Rainbow Families as “alternative families” with
the families’ desire to take control of their own self-presentation. Wanting to question why
it remains so unusual to have LGBTQ+ people included in museum interpretations, these
portraits were taken in the British Galleries, ensuring that the families were placed and
recorded at the very heart of British history within the museum. The feedback from the
group was very positive, showing how a little tailoring can create a museum environment
where no one needs to feel “alternative.”

From Butch to Camp

To unsettle the interpretive dynamics of the galleries further, I turned to the wall of glass
cases between the residency studio and the public galleries. These cases can be used by the
Artist in Residence to show work in progress and display objects from the collections that
inspire or interest them.
The museum regularly holds themed Friday Lates where the museum opens its doors into the
night and holds a series of events and talks. During my residency period, a ceramic-themed late
was planned, and I decided to select objects from the museum’s collections and arrange them in
the case outside my studio. I chose to look at the figurines in the collections. I have an uneasy
relationship with figurines. While I appreciate their craftsmanship, many of them run counter to
 In Residence at the V&A 75

contemporary taste. Whether it is their diminutive size, or the posing and modeling of the fig-
ures, they can also seem quite camp. I was interested in exploring what these figurines might
reveal about historic portrayals of gender, and how these might correspond to contemporary
expectations of male and female behavior. I therefore started by lining up a selection of the
museum’s figurines on a scale from most butch to most camp. This proved more difficult than I
expected and led to discussions about what camp means and how to grade it.
Realizing that contemporary eyes will never completely understand how these see-
mingly effeminate performances of masculinity were read in the past, I decided to try
and overlay a contemporary barometer of camp – the Eurovision Song Contest 5 – onto
the museum’s collections to see whether there was any correlation between a country’s
success in the Eurovision versus the campness of the museum’s holdings of figurines from
that country. Ireland was the big surprise in my research. With the most Eurovision wins
of any country – seven total – I was hoping for an avalanche of camp, but unfortunately
the holdings of Irish ceramics contain few figurines. Germany (which has entered the
competition more times than any other nation but has only won twice) scored highly on
number of figurines, but their scale was relatively diminutive. Britain (five wins) came
through on both number and size of camp figurines. France (also five wins) seemed to
concentrate on scale rather than number.
Underneath the frivolity, exploring the collections from this alternative viewpoint
raises some difficult questions. Museums reflect what is considered important in society,
and the collection of ceramic figurines certainly includes representations of gender and
racial difference. For groups in society whose difference is less visible – including many
people who identify as LGBTQ+ – seeing themselves reflected in the collections is more

FIGURE 6.3 From Butch to Camp. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Source: Photography by Peter Kelleher © V&A.
76 Matt Smith

difficult and may depend on conflating characteristics (in this case camp) with an identity
group (here, gay men). Since many gay men feel no affinity with camp, this use of ste-
reotypes is problematic. For the numerous men who posed for their photograph under
the Camp vinyl sign, though, this seemed to be less of a problem.

Blacks, Dogs, and Irish

Having queered museum collections, I was very much aware of the difficulties that museums
can experience in trying to represent the changing world in which they operate. Museum
collections are built up over time and are often a product of the society that collected the
objects. What and who is considered important and what is acceptable alters as society
changes. This can lead to historical gaps in the collections. What has been collected can
influence whose histories can be told, and without representative objects, some groups may
become silenced – often inadvertently – within museums.
As a result, the second redisplay of the cases outside the ceramic studio drew on the
difficulty I found looking for Irish figurines – and Irish ceramics more broadly – in the
V&A collections. Although Ireland had a relatively small level of industrial production,
Irish craft has a long history, and the relationship between England and Ireland is long-
standing, highly interlinked, and complex. To draw attention to these circumstances, the
second case took the discriminatory phrase “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” as its starting
point. This phrase derives from racist signs in the windows of some pubs and bed &
breakfasts in England in the 1960s, and it has moved into everyday language as an ugly
example of historic discrimination. Almost sixty years after those signs were in use, I was
interested in finding out whether a place had been found within the ceramic collections at
the V&A for representations of people of color, objects from Ireland, or dogs.
When searching for suitable objects in the catalogue, it became clear that using the key-
word dog or Ireland (in the country field) worked. However, to find representations of people
of color in the museum database, proper names like Jim Crow or thematic descriptions like
figure group representing Africa had to be used. Otherwise, the objects needed to be described
with phrases that included racial terms such as figure representing a young black man. In contrast,
a similar object depicting a Caucasian would have been unlikely to be described as figure
representing a young white man, revealing the hierarchies of power and norms at work. When
queering museums, I have occasionally been asked, “museums do not talk about hetero-
sexuality, so why should they talk about homosexuality?” This question also becomes
important when considering race and other kinds of diversity. While I was uncomfortable
that racial difference was used to identify certain objects (those that depicted people of color),
and I would argue that the rules should be used consistently across the museum, when
auditing collections and accessing representations of differing characteristics, this strategy of
identifying marginalizing characteristics can be helpful and important.
While tagging objects with keywords related to their LGBTQ+ associations can be helpful, Patrik
Steorn (2011) suggests that to “attribute tags like ‘homosexual’ or ‘queer’ or ‘heterosexual’ to objects
in museum and archival collections … [will] not be able to account for the juicy stuff – the kinds of
emotional attachment, desire, knowledge and narratives that may queer any certain object.” Steorn
brings us back to the conversations with the Out in Art group: the links between objects, emotional
attachment, and desire. These links require close and careful readings and an openness that is often
overlooked in the need to catalogue and classify museum collections.
 In Residence at the V&A 77

More broadly, the Blacks, Dogs and Irish display spoke to the need for constantly auditing
which objects should be acquired in times of demographic and social change for museums to
reflect society adequately. In the future, it will be important to see what today’s collecting
decisions reveal about how museum staff currently see the world.

Conclusion
I would argue that any artist residency has the potential to queer an organization if the artist
is allowed – and expected – to look at the organization afresh, to question how things
happen and, on occasion, speak truth to power. Many people at the V&A are conducting
brilliant work with representation, including LGBTQ+ visibility. However, like most
organizations, equality is not uniform within the organization.
While there are exceptions, many museums see LGBTQ+ programming as an add-on to
be done by education teams or the (usually volunteer and often underfunded) LGBTQ+
group. In other cases, LGBTQ+ representation serves as the basis for a temporary exhibition.
Few museums have taken the time to review their permanent displays and embed queer
narratives in line with the 2010 UK Equality Act, which places a duty on organizations like the
V&A to “advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic
and those who do not” (V&A 2014).
I have been fortunate to work behind the scenes at the V&A twice now and to find out what
a lovely, liberal group of people work there. I look forward to the day when its interpretation
reflects those progressive attitudes so that all visitors realize that they are welcome, that their
histories are embraced, and that their place in history is recognized. It is essential that these his-
tories are included, since “to control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a
community and some of its highest most authoritative truths. . . . What we see and do not see in
our most prestigious art museums – and on what terms and whose authority we do or don’t see
it – involves the much larger questions of who constitutes the community and who shall exercise
the power to define its authority” (Duncan 1994, 286).
Talking about LGBTQ+ intimacies and sexualities will require many museums to alter how
they interpret objects, since the status quo assumes and privileges white, cisgender, male hetero-
sexuality. As many of the authors in this book show, queering museums does not need to be
limited to LGBTQ+ interpretation, rather it can be seen as a way to question, disturb, and dis-
rupt the status quo, a way to refresh what we do and say within our museums, and a way to
ensure that these great organizations are as representative and relevant to the populations they
serve as possible. Of course, this work is never finished: if queer is in opposition to the norm, and
we accept that societal norms are in constant flux, then any opposition will also be in a constant
state of transition. For me, queer’s true potential is that it will allow us continually to question
and reinvent these organizations, allowing us to repeatedly view their collections afresh.

Notes
1 The V&A is a large, complex organization. I would not have realized my work there without the
help of a huge number of people. I would therefore like to thank Alun Graves, Rebecca Wallis, and
Florence Tyler in the Ceramic Department; Anne Eatwell, who allowed me access to the Edward
Barnard & Sons archive; Peta Motture in Sculpture; and Matty Pye and Leanne Manfredi in the
Education Department. Thanks also to Dimitrios Skyllas for his stunning composition; Pat Pope
(www.patpope.com) for his brilliant images; and to the wonderful people at Rainbow Families
78 Matt Smith

(www.rainbowfamilies.org.uk) and Opening Doors (www.openingdoorslondon.org.uk). I would

like to congratulate Dawn Hoskin, Zorian Clayton, and Dan Vo for all they have achieved with
LGBTQ+ programming in the museum, and remember the very talented Oliver Winchester who,
with Amy Mechowski, paved the LGBTQ+ way at the museum. Mostly, I would like to thank the
amazing Laura Carderera, who runs the Artist in Residence scheme and makes things happen.
Additional images from the residency may be seen at www.mattjsmith.com.
2 A film about the project is located at https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/short-film
-about-matt-smiths-project-spode-a-31-note-lovesong.
3 Brighton, a city on the south coast of England, has one of the largest LGBTQ+ populations in the
country.
4 Staffordshire flatbacks are ceramic figure groups made in England. They were immensely popular
during the nineteenth century.
5 Held annually, the Eurovision Song Contest is a televised international song competition. It has a
large gay following and is both adored and considered very kitschy.

References
Collins English Dictionary. 2018. S.v. “queer.” https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/eng
lish/queer.
Duncan, Carol. 1994. “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship.” In Interpreting Objects and Collec-
tions, edited by Susan M. Pearce, 279–286. London: Routledge.
Eatwell, Ann. 2013. “Making Silver Sculpture for the Victorian Home.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/
caring-for-our-collections/making-silver-sculpture-victorian-home.
Gilbert, Jack. 2007. “The Proud Nation Survey Has Revealed a Shocking Reluctance of the Museums
Sector to Integrate LGBT Material into their Exhibitions.” Museums Journal 107(October): 19.
Halberstam, J. Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Halperin, David. 1995. Saint=Foucault: Towards a Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Robert. 2010. “Queer is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories and Public Cul-
ture.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, edited by Amy K. Levin, 80–88. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Steorn, Patrik. 2011. “Queer in the Museum.” http://feminismandcurating.pbworks.com/w/page/
44328295/Patrik%20Steorn.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2014. “V&A Equality and Diversity Policy.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/
info/reports-strategic-plans-and-policies.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2018a. “About Us.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/about-us.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2018b. “Bust of Cato the Younger.” http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/
O333019/bust-of-cato-the-younger-bust-josiah-wedgwoods-factory/.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2018c. “Bust of Zeno.” http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O333529/
bust-of-zeno-bust-josiah-wedgwoods-factory/.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2018d. “Louis XIII of France.” http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/
O66316/louis-xiii-of-france-statuette-le-sueur-hubert/.
Victoria and Albert Museum. 2018e. “Male Ensemble for Because We Must.” http://collections.vam.ac.
uk/item/O1160531/male-ensemble-for-ibecause-we-dance-costume-bowery-leigh/.
Vo, Dan. 2015. “Why the V&A Gay and Lesbian Tour is Essential.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/m
useum-life/why-the-va-gay-and-lesbian-tour-is-essential.
B. Alternate Spaces
7
POP-UP OR PERMANENT? THE CASE OF
THE MARDI GRAS MUSEUM
Tuan Nguyen

Pop-up retail, pop-up restaurants, and now pop-up museums. The explosion of these
ephemeral establishments, often in unusual locations, prompted a New York Times satirist to
declare that pop-ups – temporary “business or cultural enterprises” untethered to any parti-
cular location – “[flaunt] their own ephemerality … [and have] lost any guerrilla chic [they]
might have once had” (Genzlinger 2011). It is tempting to dismiss pop-up museums as
contradictory to the permanence associated with their traditional counterparts. However,
while debates over definitions persist, the frequent appearance of pop-ups suggests that they
will continue to exist. With this in mind, I focus on how museum pop-up organizers
appropriate both museum and broader pop-up practices to counter LGBTQ+ invisibility.
First, I trace the emergence of pop-up museums before outlining the critique of their
impermanence. The second section evaluates the broader benefits of pop-ups in producing
(self) representations of LGBTQ+ lives. The final section uses the pop-up Mardi Gras
Museum in Sydney as a case study illustrating the debates over pop-ups. Ultimately, I assert
that the value of pop-ups stems from the subversion of traditional museum conventions,
especially as pop-ups pioneer experimental forms of inclusion and engagement.

Pop-up museums and their critiques

Pop-ups and museums are vastly different concepts, and combining them has resulted in
imprecise terminology. Thus, although the former often refer to themselves as museums,
they are also described as exhibitions, exhibits, displays, events, or simply pop-ups.1 Debates
surrounding pop-ups question whether their temporary nature precludes their categorization
as legitimate museums, even as pop-ups are blamed by some for the potential erosion of
larger institutions. This section focuses on a central tension between pop-ups and long-term
displays, making the case for the former as a new genre that productively appropriates and
questions museum conventions, revealing innovative directions for all museums.
The International Council of Museums (ICOM) defines a museum as “a non-profit, per-
manent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which
acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible
82 Tuan Nguyen

heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoy-
ment” (2007; emphasis added). This definition refers to a variety of functions (acquisition,
conservation, research, communication, and exhibition), as well as the aim of “service to
society and its development.” However, a 2017 review committee noted that the definition
ratified in 2007 “doesn’t speak the language of the 21st century,” especially in regard to
“expectations of cultural democracy, equal exchange, and coproduction” (International
Council of Museums 2017). To these concerns we can add that certain organizations that are
widely accepted as museums are excluded. For example, the Museum of Sex in New York
City was denied nonprofit status because of its subject matter. It is not a museum by the
ICOM definition even though few would deny its classification as such (Forbes 2016, 20). In
addition, the requirement that museums be permanent and acquire collections excludes pop-
ups. Clearly, such formal definitions of museums, while conceptually and administratively
useful, must constantly be renegotiated according to contemporary needs.
The idea of a pop-up site for anything from an apothecary to a zoo has proliferated in the
last ten years, first in retail and commercial arenas, and then in cultural and GLAM (galleries,
libraries, archives, and museums) organizations. The concept was first outlined by Michelle
DelCarlo (2012) for her master’s research project. Silvia Giordano has since formulated a
concise definition: “The Pop-Up Museum could be considered as a short-term institution,
mobile museum or outdoor exhibit, created outside the confines of its traditional location, in
existing temporary or unexpected places, with strong community anchors and the aim of
enhancing civic engagement” (2013, 262).
Many pop-up museums are open to the public for a few days. Others, such as the Denver
Community Museum (DCM), operate for longer periods (October 2008–April 2009).
Organizer Jaime Kopke (2009) developed monthly DCM exhibitions with “no budget, no
staff, no permanent location, no Board of Directors, and no collections.” Instead, the
museum, situated in an unused storefront, relied entirely upon participants who contributed
material on broad themes such as “twenty-nine,” which called for objects and stories related
to their past or future twenty-nine-year-old selves. Significantly, everything submitted was
exhibited, and Kopke left the labels unedited “as a direct conversation between the creator
and visitor” (Kopke 2011, 400). The DCM departed in three key ways from traditional
museum practice: the institution was not permanent; it did not draw upon longstanding
collections; and the curator’s role was simply to select the initial concept and encourage
participation. Control was shared with participants, who were relied upon to make
contributions, interact with others, and steer the project’s direction.
Pop-up museums cater to contemporary expectations of interactive museum experiences
and recast the museum in a democratic, rather than authoritative, mold. They draw upon
established museum practices such as the use of objects to engage with audiences and mediate
conversations. However, the objects are not selected to elucidate existing structures of
knowledge but rather according to their personal and emotional resonances. Although they
may appear to return to cabinets of curiosities, pop-ups are arguably simply more honest
about their subjective nature than most museums. In contemporary pop-ups, while objects
are still used to stimulate conversations, they remain secondary to dialogue and sharing ideas.
Whereas traditional museums have been criticized for their emphasis on collections over
people, research over education, and elitism over accessibility, pop-ups place objects in the
service of participants’ experiences. They eschew the authority that museums and curators
have exercised in favor of contested and negotiated meanings. Since pop-ups rely on
 The Case of the Mardi Gras Museum 83

community members to bring items, and they form connections with members of margin-
alized communities, the format is an especially powerful way of overturning LGBTQ+
invisibility. Moreover, they can provide inclusive spaces away from gentrified, predominately
white and cisgender gay male neighborhoods (Ghaziani and Stillwagon 2018). Pop-ups thus
have the potential to cater to underserved queer communities and appeal to those who locate
themselves outside of homo- and heteronormativity.
Despite the democratic potential of pop-up museums, the mixed effects of temporary
programming must be considered. Museum scholar Richard Sandell observes that past
representations of sex, gender, and sexual diversity have been partial (occluding transgender
and intersex diversity in particular), segregated from mainstream programming in their sche-
duling and location, and ephemeral, “most commonly … temporary interventions that leave
the museum relatively unchanged” (2017, 148–149). As other contributors to this book point
out, conventional museums in the UK and USA still grapple with regular LGBTQ+ inclu-
sion. Frequently, LGBTQ+ programming is temporary, coinciding with festivals such as
Sydney’s Mardi Gras, with eighteen of twenty-two relevant exhibitions in Australia between
2006 to 2016 being part of queer festivals (Nguyen 2018, 145). Although these festivals
provide focal points for queer programming, they have been criticized for marking the only
time for such inclusion (Winchester 2012, 144).
This critique of impermanence figures prominently in the debate over the Mardi Gras
Museum, which I discuss later. However, I propose that this temporary nature spurs experi-
mental forms of cultural expression and productive discussions about the purpose of muse-
ums. While fleeting, pop-ups continue the legacy of queer tactics such as zaps2 that target
sources of oppression and then retreat. By appropriating museum and pop-up practices, queer
pop-up organizers engage in guerrilla attempts to shock cultural institutions out of hetero-
normative complicity and complacency. They elude cooptation into mainstream narratives
by appearing and quickly packing down, sometimes leaving a digital record of their occur-
rence. Hence, while recognizing ongoing critical exchanges, I consider pop-up museums as a
genre worthy of serious attention from museums and LGBTQ+ communities.

Benefits of queer pop-up museums

Pop-ups hold several advantages over traditional formats, including their ability to bypass
censorship and forge – or stem from – close connections with communities. In addition, they
possess flexibility and encourage experimentation. This section examines the Mardi Gras
Museum, the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and other queer pop-ups to illustrate the
benefits and drawbacks of this new genre for LGBTQ+ communities. Pop-up museums
should not be dismissed simply due to preconceived notions about museums.
Although traditional museums feature some of the qualities listed above, they are founda-
tional to pop-up museums. The latter rely heavily, if not exclusively, on communities for
their production and success. The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History (PUMQH), which
started in New York City, regards community production as necessary to the representation
of queerness on its own terms. Founder Hugh Ryan contends, “when and where queer
history has been kept, it has been kept by queer people” (2014a, 85). He indicates that pop-
ups are unique among forms of public history because they “focus on [members of] our
community teaching each other” (Nichols 2013). PUMQH did this by conducting “guer-
rilla-docented” tours of exhibits at major museums, popping up in different locations to
84 Tuan Nguyen

increase accessibility, as well as paying local and emerging queer artists to contribute to shows
(Ryan 2014b). Consequently, queer connections could be formed outside the disciplinary
authority of major institutions that might dismiss them as irrelevant or inaccurate. Moreover,
beyond the network of high-profile curators and art dealers, pop-up museums can reduce the
commodification of queer artists by galleries and museums.
Another benefit of pop-up museums is their flexibility. They are generally inexpensive to pro-
duce and operate. They often depend on volunteer labor, donated spaces, and small, sporadic
financial contributions. Although this can cause a high turnover among organizers, shifting loca-
tions, reduced public accountability, and unpredictable funding, one organizer asserts that it can
also lead to a “lean organization” which is “nimble, dynamic and flexible” (Nagata 2017, 36).
These positive attributes of pop-ups are increasingly important now, when traditional streams of
funding are declining in the UK, USA, and Australia (American Association of Museums 2012;
van Barneveld and Chiu 2017; Museums Association 2017). In fact, pop-ups may present a way
for established museums to reduce costs through community-oriented programming, and, if they
are faced with closure, a means to maintain public access.
As a complementary genre rather than a replacement, the pop-up offers different experiences.
The Coffs Harbor Museum in Australia, for example, collaborated with a local shopping center to
open exhibits in empty storefronts while the museum was closed due to flooding. Mall customers
passing by far outnumbered intentional museum patrons: “Instead of having 20 people a day we
were getting 200,” a number that likely reflects the diversity of the community more fully (Empty
Spaces 2011). Such collaborations can provide venues for LGBTQ+ exhibits that might be
considered too risky for high profile museums, and they can be located in places frequented by
their intended audiences. The MGM, for instance, was on the main street of Sydney’s LGBTQ+
district, attracting attention from shoppers, revelers, and passersby.
In many pop-ups, participants are encouraged to handle objects brought in by others – for
example, to hold a picture frame, play an instrument, pass an object around in a circle – which is
counter to the overriding message of “don’t touch” in museums and galleries. For the SoHo
Memory Project, participants interacted with often ephemeral objects relating to the themes of
living, working, playing, and eating in the New York City neighborhood (for instance, opening
a jar to smell locally produced leather goods). For the founder, the exhibit would not be intel-
ligible otherwise: “One has to touch, feel, smell, listen, and do all these things. If you just stand
and look at it, it wouldn’t make sense” (quoted in Nagata 2017, 47–48). In museum scholarship,
increasing attention is paid to the affective and sensorial dimensions of experiences that extend
beyond sight (Dudley 2010, 2012). In this framework, touch is a legitimate way of forming
knowledge and meaning, a privilege usually reserved for curators, conservators, registrars, and
collection workers (Candlin 2010, 108). Pop-up museums provide spaces where objects can be
shared – everyday, crafted, and duplicate objects that museums might overlook. This is not to say
that pop-up organizers are unconcerned with the welfare of objects, only that individuals are
presumed to have an active relationship with them.
In addition, the flexibility of pop-ups may allow them to circumvent censorship. In the
debate surrounding the MGM, the Lord Mayor hypothesized that a “conservative Council
[might try] to pressure the curator into toning down or removing an exhibition they thought
offensive” (Moore 2014). Even though independent boards govern many mainstream muse-
ums, they can still be influenced by political pressure, for instance, through partisan
appointments. Indeed, the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History was created in response to
censorship at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Fire in My Belly by David
 The Case of the Mardi Gras Museum 85

Wojnarowicz – a small video segment of which showed ants crawling on a crucifix – was
removed from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture in 2010 after protests
from a right-wing Catholic group and members of Congress (Kennicott 2010). Hugh Ryan
was infuriated by the act and founded the PUMQH:

I wanted a space where queer people could learn queer history as told by other queer
folks. I didn’t want to stroll through a great exhibition waiting for the homophobic shoe
to drop, or be forced to read between the lines to find the queer content, or go to yet
another gallery where there was no bathroom my friends could use comfortably. I
wanted a queer museum. So I made one.
(2014a, 80)

The suppression of Wojnarowicz’s work supports Moore’s claim that censorship could follow
on from public control and funding. As pop-ups are not tied to any one location and source
of income, they can circumvent similar attempts at censorship.
Pop-up museums also create spaces for experimentation, a result of their flexibility in
relation to finances and museum practices. For the pop-up exhibition Queering the Museum
(November 5–6, 2016), curators at the Migration Museum in Adelaide experimented with
interpretive approaches that might not have been permitted in the main museum space. They
invited eight LGBTQ+ community members to reinterpret the museum’s collection from a
queer perspective, resulting in items such as a lavender dress being used to recount the history
of “lavender marriages” (LGBTQ+ people marrying as a ruse to live out their queer desires).
Their colleagues at the museum, although supportive of LGBTQ+ inclusion, expressed
reservations that the exhibition would “ignore” the provenance of the objects or disrespect
the wishes of donors (Sullivan and Middleton 2017). In addition, if experimental pop-up
ventures do not work, the negative consequences are minimized. This creates an environ-
ment where failure becomes an opportunity for iterative improvement. The positive aspects
of failure in a queer museum context are also discussed in chapter 23 in this volume.

The Mardi Gras Museum

Turning to an example of success, the Mardi Gras Museum (MGM) was a pop-up that com-
memorated the thirty-five-year history of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (Mardi Gras).
From its opening, it fueled vigorous debate within and outside the queer community about
whether it should become permanent. This gave voice to the important critique that pop-up
museums, like temporary exhibitions, create and then revoke spaces for cultural expression. They
fail to signal a continuing commitment to inclusion. However, opportunities to explore the full
potential of pop-up museums are overlooked when they are dismissed in this way.
The Sydney Mardi Gras was first held on June 24, 1978 – close to the anniversary of the
Stonewall Riots (June 28, 1969) – in response to a call by the San Francisco Gay Freedom
Day Committee for a day of action. The two thousand attendees were denied access to Hyde
Park, despite possessing a permit to demonstrate. They then marched to Kings Cross, the red
light and nightclub district in Sydney, where police surrounded them and made fifty-three
violent arrests. Every year since, Mardi Gras has been held as a protest against homophobia
and a celebration of the diverse LGBTQ+ community, attracting up to 12,300 participants
and half a million spectators (Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras 2018, 4).
86 Tuan Nguyen

To reflect upon the role of Mardi Gras as a symbol of struggle against police and
state oppression, the MGM (January 29–March 3, 2013) opened in a retail space owned
by the City of Sydney. Curator Nick Henderson used photographs, costumes, t-shirts,
banners, political badges, posters, leaflets, letters, and videos to chart the history of the
event from its explosive beginning to its vibrant present. These items included the
invitation from the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Committee, footage of the inau-
gural parade from the documentary Witches, Faggots, Dykes, and Poofters, Ken Davis’s
“International Gay Solidarity” banner for the 1978 event, and Ron Muncaster’s spec-
tacular neon rainbow Mardi Gras costume. The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
(ALGA), a community organization based in Melbourne, supplied most of the exhibited
material. Sixty-five hundred visitors saw the exhibition during the two months it was
open, and it led to extensive discussion on community and social media about whether
a permanent museum should be established.3
The question became a political issue when all mayoral candidates except the incum-
bent in the 2012 election pledged support for a permanent LGBTQ+ museum. The
proposed site, a heritage-listed former bank branch (1–5 Flinders Street), was often
referred to as the T2 building after a club that once operated there. Clover Moore, the
incumbent, was returned for a third term and opened the pop-up exhibit on January 29,
2013. The issue of permanence persisted. At the opening, broadcaster and activist Julie
McCrossin declared, “we need a museum just as we have the Sydney Jewish Museum
and the Australian War Memorial. . . . Museums help people in a democracy understand
one another” (AAP 2013). Representatives from the Mardi Gras organization also advo-
cated for a permanent museum, with CEO Michael Rolik observing that “we had to
leave quite a bit out of the exhibition. . . . A permanent museum would let us tell those
stories” (McKinnon 2013).
The news that the T2 building would be sold rather than turned into a long-term
museum mobilized LGBTQ+ individuals to start the T2 Community Collective. One of
its representatives, activist Alastair Lawrie (2016), argued that the absence of a museum
“denies us the opportunity to pay respect to the people who have come before, and
limits the ability of younger members of the LGBTI community to learn about older
generations.” The collective launched an online petition that, as of July 2018, garnered
824 signatures (Save the T2 Community Collective 2016). Their calls to save the build-
ing were joined by the Darlinghurst Business Partnership, a group of small business
owners who submitted that the council should put “something in there that is of benefit
to the community” such as a museum (Busby 2016). For members of the LGBTQ+
community who expressed their support for a permanent museum, temporary repre-
sentation during festivals appeared insufficient and a mere placeholder for lasting cultural
interventions. They appreciated the benefits of the format but valued the visibility
inherent in a permanent institution more.
Arguably, what was lost in the debate surrounding the Mardi Gras Museum was the
opportunity to consider the benefits of pop-up versus permanent museums. For the
curator, Nick Henderson (2015), “the museum was a one-off, proof of concept” and was
always intended to be temporary. He argued that permanence existed elsewhere, not
through a continuing organization but through the ALGA collection from which it was
drawn. His position suggests that pop-up and permanent museums may be imbricated
and complementary.
 The Case of the Mardi Gras Museum 87

Conclusions
Should the pop-up Mardi Gras Museum be made permanent? And what are the implications
for future queer pop-up museums? The passion behind arguments for the proposition shows
that LGBTQ+ communities are deeply concerned with transmitting their histories. Alongside
the understandable desire for lasting cultural infrastructure, the debate was influenced by the
assumption that museums must be permanent.
While supporters of permanent museums view the ephemerality of pop-up museums as a
weakness, for others, it is essential to their appeal. Museums and galleries regularly capitalize on
the desire to see temporary, blockbuster exhibitions. Pop-ups go one step further in closing
down the entire museum at the end of a show, adding to the sense of urgency. PUMQH
founder Hugh Ryan (2013) saw in pop-ups the opportunity to “make history cool” as, “by
definition, something that is time delimited comes with a feeling of scarcity – see it now or
never – and this can work in your favor in terms of getting bodies in the room.” The con-
sumerist logic worked in conjunction with the prestige that a permanent LGBTQ+ museum was
imagined to bring: the MGM was marketed as a “debut exhibition” (Sydney Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras 2013) and the subsequent debate focused on it becoming the “first” LGBTQ+
museum in Australia, which might compete with permanent LGBTQ+ museums in cities
including Berlin and San Francisco. Although museums and galleries have long drawn crowds
with the promise of exclusive treasures, pop-ups could accelerate a trend toward an event-driven
museum. Indeed, the social media platforms that enable pop-ups to be advertised reconfigure
LGBTQ+ communities as much as they strengthen them: there are new digital “haves” and
“have nots,” and socio-sexual apps continue to put pressure on physical LGBTQ+ venues.
Similarly, pop-up museums might erode perceptions of the permanent and authoritative
museum and signal a more volatile society.
With this awareness, I have sought to consider the pop-up museum as a new genre that
warrants attention from traditional museums and LGBTQ+ communities. Pop-ups queer the
concept of the museum through their evasion of historical understandings of duration (in per-
petuity), acceptable object usage (seen from a distance), and intended or imagined audience
(heteronormative society). If more conventional museums experiment with best practices from
both pop-up and permanent museum traditions, they might find novel ways to create strong,
responsive organizations relevant to the needs of LGBTQ+ communities and broader society.
For LGBTQ+ communities, pop-ups present new ways to continue the legacy of guerrilla
activism – making an impact, regrouping in places of safety, and mobilizing another intervention.

Notes
1 An exhibition is considered here as a comprehensive grouping of material (such as artworks, archival
documents, images, and objects) on a particular subject, which is available to the public. While some
authors in this book consider the term equivalent to an exhibition, I refer to an exhibit as a smaller,
cohesive unit of the latter. The terms display and exhibit are used here interchangeably, although the
first applies more broadly to items that are not necessarily in a museum (for instance, a shop display).
Museum historians have described the similarities between displays in department stores, interna-
tional fairs, and museums as revealing their common links with consumer capitalism (Bennett 1995,
30; Witcomb 2003, 21–22).
2 Zaps are spontaneous forms of nonviolent protest that use “guerrilla theater, irony, and satire” to
highlight oppressions (Warner 2012, x). They were first used by free speech and antiwar activists in
the 1960s, and later by groups such as the Gay Activist Alliance and the direct action organization
88 Tuan Nguyen

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). LGBTQ+ zap protests include kiss-ins (public kissing
to provoke discomfort), die-ins (simulations of dying to expose indifference toward LGBTQ+
mortalities), and glitter bombing (showering unsuspecting people in glitter to hijack the conversation
and move it toward LGBTQ+ concerns).
3 Dozens of articles have been published about the Mardi Gras Museum in LGBTQ+ media including
Gay News Network, SX, SameSame, and Star Observer between 2012 and 2018. Unfortunately, articles
from Gay News Network, SX, and SameSame – representing the majority of articles on the topic – are
now unavailable because the publisher, Evo Media, became insolvent in 2017. Inactive links have
been removed from references below. Opinions regarding the museum were also gathered from
those in attendance at events, interviews with curator Nick Henderson and LGBTQ+ historian
Robert French, and online conversations, including those on the official Facebook page (Sydney
Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras 2013).

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Busby, Cec. 2016. “Darlinghurst Businesses Call for Activation of T2 Building.” Gay News Network.
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8
EMPTIED, DISPLACED, ASSIMILATED
Spatial Politics of Gender in Ankara Ulucanlar Prison
Museum

Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş

Ulucanlar Prison, constructed in 1925 in the heart of Turkey’s capital city, Ankara, was one
of the first prisons in the Turkish Republic. By its closure in 2006, it had witnessed a broad
swath of Turkey’s political history, including coups d’état; Kurdish struggles; Armenian
conflicts; and popular uprisings. Within its walls, long detentions without trial, executions,
torture, hunger strikes, and massacres of political prisoners occurred. Although the memor-
ialization project of Ulucanlar Prison created an expectation of confrontation with its bloody
past, the museum ultimately turned into a tool and space for legitimizing the ruling Justice
and Development Party’s (JDP) policies.
The history of punishment and prisons is inherently gendered. Although nearly all institu-
tions that formerly segregated the sexes, such as schools, faith centers, workplaces, and factories,
now mix them, prisons remain an exception.1 Hence, it might be said that the prison experi-
ence is always already gendered. Thousands of females, LGBTQ+ individuals, and children
were imprisoned in Ulucanlar, including leftists, journalists, novelists, artists, feminists, and
Kurdish political leaders,2 along with women convicted of ordinary crimes. Therefore, Ulu-
canlar Prison serves as a testament to two historical trends: the Turkish Republic’s construction
and treatment of female and queer criminals, and these prisoners’ resistance to the patriarchal
state despite living under extreme repression.
We, this chapter’s authors, are women with strong ties to Ulucanlar Prison. One of us was a
political prisoner in Ulucanlar; the other witnessed massacres and resistance efforts in the prison.
Throughout this chapter, we focus upon how memories and (in)tangible traces of female prisoners,
LGBTQ+ individuals, and juvenile inmates are consumed, assimilated, reused, or erased in the
musealization process. We also analyze the political, spatial, temporal, and affective losses of gen-
dered memory in Ulucanlar Prison Museum as the administration has transformed and absorbed
the everyday experiences of prisoners into a narrative that legitimates and strengthens the ruling
party and its patriarchal conservative policies. Although the JDP government has claimed that the
museum offers a confrontation with the prison’s – and the Turkish Republic’s – bloody past, the
museum fails to do so or to operate as a proper memorial.
Since 2015, we have visited this museum many times and kept careful track of changes
that have occurred. Between May and June 2017, we conducted ten in-depth interviews
 Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum 91

about the musealization process with employees, including two directors, six guides, and two
cafeteria workers. In addition, we examined news media regarding the site and documents in
its library. We conducted a comprehensive literature search, including published interviews,
oral histories, novels, and autobiographies about Ulucanlar. In 2017, we interviewed ten
former prisoners, conducting two of the interviews on site. Perhaps most importantly, we
walked with former political prisoners through corridors, cells, and yards, listening to their
stories, which often contradicted official histories.
To illustrate the spatial-temporal politics of gender in the transition from prison to prison
museum, we begin by presenting theoretical issues about the gendered production of space.
The next section outlines the history of the prison and its transition into a museum. After
these introductory sections, we will analyze strategic aspects of the (re)construction of
Ulucanlar Prison Museum. The first pertains to creating emptiness from the abundance of
material pertaining to female, LGBTQ+, and juvenile prisoners. The second, assimilation
and decontexualization, refers to filling space with miscellaneous objects and juxtaposing
unrelated names or events while appropriating feminist and critical narratives to legitimize
the museum’s official JDP-aligned narrative.

Production of the prison museum: Space and gender

Despite the popularity of multivocal presentations in major museums, many institutions have
failed to follow suit. In Turkey, for example, it is uncommon for museums to give voice to
multiple memories/narratives/identities, especially when they deviate from official, hegemonic
scripts. As a result, the representation of gender in museum spaces is limited but important.
Consideration of museums as spaces that attempt to represent social and cultural heritage must
be situated within recent discussions about geographical and spatial analysis. Doreen Massey, in
defining space and gender relationality, argues that we must conceive of space as “a way of
thinking in terms of the ever-shifting geometry of social/power relations, and it forces into view
the real multiplicities of space-time” (2001, 4). Massey defines the contemporary hegemonic
spatial realm as exclusionary when it acquires a fixed identity related to the dominant
population (4–5). In order to analyze the transformation of prison space into museum space,
we must consider the power relations that characterize both kinds of institutions.
Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Dolores Hayden (1995) contend that spaces are replete with human
experiences. This means that the design, construction, and population of places reveal much about
the individuals who occupy them, as well as about the social hierarchies and gender inequalities of
the time. Hayden also argues that places have “personalities” created by memories and narratives
about them (1995, 15–18). Therefore, when analyzing how memories are incorporated into
museum spaces, we must consider the effects of social hierarchies and power structures.
As memorials, prison museums are a subset of dark tourism (Lennon and Foley 2000),
along with other sites of difficult heritage, such as cemeteries, battlefields, disaster areas, and
Holocaust institutions (Frew and White 2013, 2–3). Elspeth Frew and Leanne White suggest
that although societies remember those who died in times of “war, regimes of terror, and
institutionalized violence,” some sites create dissonance by stressing only certain aspects of
their historical importance. They observe, “questions arise about who has the responsibility to
make such decisions: the actual owners of the site, the survivors and families of the victims,
the local community or the broader national or international community” (2013, 4). In
addition to these questions of agency, when it comes to prison heritage, the museum effect
92 Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş

comes into play. Defined by Valerie Casey as “the complex interplay between objects,
images, and spaces” (quoted in Welch 2015, 4), this effect is evident as political power
relations affect collective memory relating to the infliction of punishment. These dynamics
mitigate against polyvocal museum presentations; the resulting gaps and absences may
promote public amnesia about prison histories, disrupting efforts to find truth and achieve
reconciliation (Carrabine 2017, 33).
Gender adds another dimension to this collective forgetting and/or political whitewashing
by prison museums. Ashley Chen and Sarah Fiander (2015, 388) have argued that in aca-
demic research, women’s prison experiences tend to be ignored at worst or marginalized
at best. Margaret Shaw and Kelly Hannah-Moffat conclude that studies of females in
correctional facilities neglect “the subjectivities of these women,” and adopt a discourse
that perpetuates “the dominance of particular subjects” (2000, 170). This “collective
amnesia” toward incarcerated women, which is often an attribute of scholarship (Shaw
and Hannah-Moffat 2000, 168–169), is also found among museum curators and admin-
istrators. Moreover, the stories of LGBTQ+ inmates remain even more underrepresented
in scholarship and in prison museums. With the minimization or erasure of the experi-
ences of women and LGBTQ+ convicts, the experiences of straight cisgender white male
inmates seem particularly prominent.

Ulucanlar Prison: A spatial history of incarceration in the Turkish Republic

The role of gender in the prison and its later manifestation as a memorial museum is best
understood in the context of the site’s history. Any prison’s history reveals not only the
institutionalization of crime and the state’s punishment strategies, but also political power and
gender relations in the country itself. Ulucanlar housed only men until the 1940s. As the
population of the prison increased, new buildings radically changed the prison’s footprint.
These included visitor and administrative facilities and cell blocks with women’s wards. Soon,
the site housed women from across the country, some incarcerated for common criminal
offenses, and others for their politics. Although the official women’s unit was located beyond
the main walls, two or three women’s wards were situated inside.
Ulucanlar Prison also witnessed coups d’état that ended with military governance in 1960,
1971, and 1980; a military intervention in 1997; and ongoing Kurdish uprisings starting in
1984. Each of these events increased the prison population because the military administra-
tion captured and tortured thousands of people. Especially after the coup of 1980, the mili-
tary government followed a policy of “making peace by mixing,” mingling prisoners with
opposing political views. Leftist inmates were held with reactionaries whose government was
in power; as ex-Minister of Commerce Agah Oktay Güner claimed, “Although I am in
prison, our ideas are in power” (Doğan 2012). Leftist prisoners undertook two long hunger
strikes in Ulucanlar and other prisons across Turkey to protest plans to transfer inmates into
cell blocks3 with strict isolation policies. The first hunger strike was enacted in 1996 by
political prisoners protesting inhumane conditions. The strikes continued for ninety-six days,
.
and Ayçe Idil Erkmen in Çanakkale Prison became the first Turkish female political prisoner
known to have died from a hunger strike. Similar strikes continued from 1999 to 2004; on
September 26, 1999, ten strikers were massacred in Ulucanlar (Yılmaz 2012).
The transition from dormitory-style prison complexes like Ulucanlar to more repressive con-
ditions had already started when the JDP came to power in 2002, and even though the party
 Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum 93

criticized previous governments in almost every way, it did not alter their incarceration strategies.
However, Ulucanlar Prison closed four years after the JDP government gained power. The
government planned to demolish the prison complex, but nongovernmental organizations and
ex-prisoners fought the move, seeking a memorial. Since this was an era of democratization, the
complex and buildings were preserved. Throughout 2007, the Union of Chambers of Turkish
Engineers and Architects (UCTEA) coordinated a series of events and activities in order to
transform the prison into a proper memorial. In spite of their work, the JDP-ruled municipality,
which owned the land on which the prison was situated, expropriated the museum project and
ultimately ignored many of the suggestions. The municipality decided to demolish or radically
renovate any buildings not protected by their historical status.

Dominating space through emptiness

The demolition by the municipality without the consent of ex-prisoners, architects, and
artists who worked on the project created the prison museum’s current landscape. Whereas
Ulucanlar Prison once included many buildings and other structures, its transformation into a
museum resulted in large vacant areas and spaces emptied of gendered associations and
memories. In the absence of gender markers, the lived experiences and resistance of women
and individuals who identified as LGBTQ+ have been lost. Bülent Batuman, an architect
from UCTEA, describes how this feeling of emptiness contrasts with the prison’s past:

We visited the prison when it was first closed; there was a spatial logic in it with all of its
extra buildings. That space used to reproduce itself with this logic. Those extra buildings
and additions were replicating that restricted, tight point-of-view. . . . I clearly remem-
ber the first time I went into Ulucanlar Prison, all the narrow spaces, all the narrow
corridors, practically all the enclosures of the prison campus were based upon this
restriction, narrowing. . . . But now [in the prison museum] all the space is much larger
and everywhere is so extended and widened and more spacious.
(Quoted in Mimdap 2012)

Experiences of severe restriction and crowding seem invalidated by the museum’s inaccurate
rendition of the space: “one of the old common criminal inmates had brought his wife and
children. Of course, previously the wards were so crowded that almost a hundred stayed in a
space for fifty persons. But now the space is emptied; it has been so extended. The inmate’s wife
looked in her husband’s eyes and said, ‘you have been telling stories for years, but this place is so
wide open.’ The inmate looked and did not know what to say” (Ünalın 2010, 87).
Voids have been created, new squares have been opened up by demolishing buildings, and
doors which no longer open are left standing. Spatial destruction is justified by a claim to the
historical value of the remaining buildings. The beautifully organized large gardens and park-
like landscape surrounding the prison museum have no visual or spatial relation to the former
campus, which was once one of the most dark, violent, haunted spaces in Ankara. In fact, the
authors lost their way when they first tried to visit the Ulucanlar Prison Museum, since the
well-known and easily distinguished tall grey walls had disappeared.
The significance of other spaces has been erased in the transformation as well. During the life
of the prison, inmates were “accepted,” “delivered,” or “held” at the main gates (Güney 1978,
236). A former inmate described his experience: “while you are being processed here at the gate,
94 Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş

FIGURE 8.1 One of the emptied units and yards. Ulucanlar Prison Museum, Ankara

the guards will finger your ass. It will make you feel great shame, you know. But I know with
certainty that they cannot do this to Oktay and his friends [referencing the leftist political pris-
oners]” (Ünalın 2010, 119). The gate where the torture of “acceptance” and other offenses
transpired now functions as the museum’s main entrance, decorously rearranged for visitors to
pay entrance fees and borrow audio guides. This space where inmates were separated, organized,
classified, and then assigned to wards according to their gender, class, political affiliation, age, or
type of crime now directs all visitors to follow only one route – into a hallway.
At first sight, the long corridor seems empty. A locked, inoperable door stands at one
end, an illegible sign hanging from it. Beside the door are three charcoal drawings
depicting women during their everyday life and a black-and-white photo of nine
females.4 Apart from these representations, the existence of the women’s ward is almost
completely erased.
From the corridor, visitors enter the isolation cells. These isolation and observation cells,
which attract dark tourism, witnessed the screams and begging of inmates. The corridor
housing the cells is now completely dark, echoing with voices of former inhabitants. These
cells were used not only for extra punishment, but also for holding LGBTQ+ people, those
“who could not be put with other prisoners in the dormitory cells” (Esra 2017).5 From our
interviews with Ulucanlar Prison Museum officers and former inmates, it has become clear
that isolation cells held transgender men and women as well as openly gay men, even though
they had not violated any prison regulations. Without guidance from the museum, only
visitors who experienced the prison first hand know the cells represent the lives of LGBTQ+
convicts; this silence obscures the identity of inmates imprisoned for their gender identity
and/or sexual orientation. Tracing the experiences of these LGBTQ+ inmates is further
 Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum 95

complicated because even political activists who challenge the current museum management or
the roles of the municipality and national government in running the prison do not acknowledge
the distinctively gendered nature of LGBTQ+ prisoners’ experiences in Ulucanlar.
The restriction of mobility – being locked up – increased bodily stress, making at least one
interviewee feel intense sexual desire (Bahar 2017), and masturbation and same-sex relations were
the only forms of release possible. Yet prisoners’ sexual desire and consensual sexual acts are never
acknowledged at the site. Yıldız Tar (2013, 2015) makes clear that, historically speaking, Turkish
leftist politics were not free from hegemonic conceptions of gender and sexuality. Political
prisoners often shared similar attitudes with the prison administration regarding sexual behavior,
desire, and LGBTQ+ existence in the prison. Some inmates kept the lights on all night in order to
avoid sexual contact with other men (Ünalın 2010, 139). A former convict expressed anger at
sexual desire among inmates and the coarseness of the staff: “The guard warned me, saying that,
‘They thought you were a lesbian since you are wearing pants and you had gained power over
them, and they see you as a man now. Sooner or later, you could encounter something like [a
sexual advance from another woman]’. . . . they were dividing vegetables into four or five pieces
because they had been used for other reasons [penetration]” (Ünalın 2010, 149–153). Prison staff,
along with conservative-minded political prisoners, repressed sexuality – and the museum
continues to silence such narratives by failing to incorporate them.
The museum appropriates the experiences of leftist female political prisoners and
LGBTQ+ inmates, as well as children, even as the gendered experiences of Kurdish
women political prisoners are completely eliminated. For example, Leyla Zana, a promi-
nent figure in the Kurdish political struggle in the 1990s, tried to give her parliamentary
oath in Kurdish and to make a statement in support of her people. As a consequence, she
and her collaborators were imprisoned in Ulucanlar for ten years, until 2004. Even though
she was one of the women incarcerated longest, and dozens of other Kurdish women
occupied the wards, none of them is mentioned in the museum. Their units have been
completely demolished. Kurdish women’s nonrepresentation is a defining absence for the
museum, as is that of the LGBTQ+ prisoners.
In addition to such instances of erasure, Ulucanlar Prison Museum fails to depict the everyday
lives of prisoners, the “truly social experiences which have the capacity to open up communities
and alter subjectivities” (Arnold-de Siminie 2013, 203). This loss in the museum’s spatio-tem-
porality is exemplified in the words of one of the museum directors, Ayla (2017), whom we
interviewed while attempting to verify the number of women incarcerated in Ulucanlar:
“Women were always in very, very small numbers. For example, during the 2000s, we housed a
total number of 5540, but only one third of them were women prisoners.” According to the
museum manager, female inmates were scarce enough that representations of their everyday lives
were unwarranted – yet nearly two thousand women per year were incarcerated there.

Domination of space with decontextualization and assimilation

Memories of the lived experiences of women, children, and LGBTQ+ prisoners are not
entirely absent from the public spaces at Ulucanlar Prison. By presenting information per-
taining to these groups outside the context of imprisonment and juxtaposing their stories
with narratives related to straight, cisgender men, the institution manages to have it both
ways: strategies of decontextualization and assimilative appropriation allow the museum to
claim that it includes these groups, even as it manages or minimizes relevant memories.
96 Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş

Similarly, the historical relevance of popular feminist and critical texts about Ulucanlar Prison
is fragmented and assimilated into the museum narrative.
The disruption in contexts is evident at the end of the tour route, when visitors enter an
exhibition hall where the infirmary was once located.6 This gallery holds the Ankara Women
From Past to Present exhibit, consisting of mannequins wearing traditional female costumes from
the Hittite Empire to the Turkish Republic. These are the only statues of women in the
museum, whereas there are over forty dummies of men posed as inmates or guards. In this
instance, the museum administration adopted a strategy that resembles the 1980s “making peace
by mixing” incarceration tactic by juxtaposing disparate ideas and populations in close conjunc-
tion. Bülent Batuman depicts this decontextualization as uninspired and unimaginative, declaring
that the museum should respect individual trauma and not mix the experiences of diverse pris-
oners (Mimdap 2012). Certainly, the folkloric representations of femininity overwrite gendered
resistance and the ways in which women’s “criminality” was historically constructed in Turkey.
The abrupt shift in context has the effect of wiping clean the slate of memory and leaving the
narrative of the prison’s history immaculate, free of “troublesome” female narratives.
Similarly, by conflating material traces of prison lives, the museum creates an asymmetrical
memory relation for women, children, and LGBTQ+ prisoners. The prison museum depicts the
lives of all inmates as taking place in the same space and being virtually identical, but former
inmate Ayten Canatan objects. She stresses the differences between the women’s ward and the
men’s, where her husband resided: “both populations have different problems and both have
very different lives. I cannot imagine a common denominator apart from just being enclosed”
(Ünalın 2010, 128). The everyday stories of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and children are
absorbed in the experiences of male inmates as names, pictures, stories, and memorial objects are
mingled together in the museum without demarcation.7 The straight, cisgender male inmate’s
experience becomes normative as traces of female existence are subsumed by an overwhelmingly
androcentric narrative.8
Conflating complex gender and sexual relations into one identity is especially obvious when it
comes to beds and walls surrounding them, which are the most individualized, gendered, and
sexually oriented objects in a prison. In the museum galleries, a scattering of women’s names and
photos are hung on beds next to those of male prisoners with whom they had no affiliation. The
individual spaces are decontextualized by erasing all possible distinctions among them. Beds
assume special importance because they host countless personal activities like reading, writing,
sleeping, and daydreaming. Former prisoner Vahap Erdoğdu explains the importance of visiting
someone’s bed: “It is like going to Istanbul from Ankara. It is something like your best friend
coming to visit you from Istanbul. He comes, invites you to sit on his bed” (Ünalın 2010, 55).
Beds also operate as a locus for sexuality. Despite being located in public space, prison beds
operate conceptually in the private realm, where gender identities and sexual orientations are (re)
constructed and (re)negotiated. The walls around the beds become private spaces to mount
posters, poems, letters, or photographs from family, friends, and lovers – or as Yılmaz Güney and
Tunç Başaran depict in their films, places to hang erotic pictures. This existence of privacy, dif-
ferentiation, individualization, and orientation toward the erotic or sexual desire are strictly
beyond the limits of the prison museum; the museum erases all traces of even the possibility of
sexual acts. In the museum, beds and walls become “innocent.”
The management also strategically appropriates and reallocates various sources, stories,
texts, films, academic studies, and other research9 that present divergent narratives of prison
history. Many stories appear in museum, the most repeated and highlighted ones being Duvar
 Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum 97

(The Wall) and Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar (Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite). These texts might
be counted as the basic affective stimuli in the museum complex as they are repurposed in a
nostalgic way, their critical and feminist content eradicated. The texts are used to allude to
the harsh conditions experienced by juvenile and women inmates, but all acts of violence
remain nebulous and depersonalized. Victims are not identified individually or collectively,
and perpetrators deliberately remain unnamed. Systemic critique is absent as well. The genre,
style, and content of both texts present prison life as gendered and sexualized, but when the
stories are assimilated into the museum’s dominant narrative, these qualities disappear. The
traumatic past is acknowledged in only the vaguest of terms.
Powerful and unforgettable critiques of prison life come from Yılmaz Güney’s film Duvar
. .
(The Wall), and his novel Soba, Pencere Camı ve Iki Ekmek Istiyoruz (We Want A Stove, A
Window, and Two Pieces of Bread), which portray the experiences of Ankara ghetto chil-
dren and condemn the hierarchical and violent environment of Ulucanlar during the 1970s.
Both focus upon the sexual harassment of child inmates by older bullies and guards. Güney
describes how guards would spend the night in the children’s ward or take children to
“bathe” (1978, 79, 251); how children performed sex acts in exchange “sometimes for an
apple, sometimes for a cigarette, or sometimes for ten tablets of drugs” (252); and how chil-
dren witnessed sexual abuse but could not testify against the assaults (in Duvar, the Wall).
Harsh conditions in the juvenile ward are central in these works, which depict crowding,
frigid weather, uncomfortable beds, and endless hunger. Although juveniles’ rebellions
against these onslaughts underpin the texts, this insurrection is never addressed in the
museum. The fourth ward is instead a huge space that depicts the lives of males convicted of
common crimes – it bears no connection to a children’s ward. And the last children’s ward,
which was used until the 2000s, has been reconstructed as a cafeteria and a library.
A similar repurposing takes on a tragic character in the women’s ward; the women’s unit, or
twelfth ward, cannot be accessed by ordinary visitors. Only official guests of the municipality
may enter the building, which has been completely rebuilt, but surely not restored to its previous
state. As one of the guides told us, the women’s ward, “oh, that, it is behind this wall, it is not in
the route of visit” (Mehmet 2017). As a result, the stories of women remain largely inaccessible.
“This wall” hides the structure and reality of women’s existence in Ulucanlar Prison. For
instance, the site obscures the 1996 and 1999 hunger strikes, together with the violent
repercussions and inmates’ resistance to that violence. In both the novel and film versions of
Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar (Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite), author Feride Çiçekoğlu and
director Tunç Başaran capture the everyday lives of female prisoners, including how food was
distributed; how solidarity among women was built and destroyed; how women’s relation-
ships with freedom and resistance were reconstructed; and how hierarchies developed among
common criminal women inmates. All these details have been diminished in the museum,
where no meaningful analysis of either the novel or the film is provided. The museum’s
rhetoric consolidates these texts in order to create an affective bond with visitors; women’s
crimes and experiences – and the way they differed from men’s – lack emphasis.

Conclusion
The Memorialize Turkey Group investigates memorial sites and evaluates them on the basis of
whether they properly commemorate marginalized or traumatized identity groups. Their report
on Ulucanlar Prison Museum (2017) argues that the museum “has literally purged its past,
98 Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş

cleaned and renovated, and a third of the cells were actually rebuilt. Thus the memorial was
stripped of its past in a physical and visual sense, losing its original appearance to a certain extent.”
The report mentions that all that remains is a sense of nostalgia and emphasizes that “it would be
misleading to claim that the Ulucanlar Prison Museum fulfils the very core principles of mem-
orialization projects that focus on human rights violations and confront past wrongdoings.”
This non-confrontation is particularly evident near the end of the museum tour, where the
bathroom, or hammam, still stands. As is well known, Turkish baths, representing the common
heritage of Roman and Ottoman sexuality, were spaces not only for cleaning but also for embo-
died encounters, nudity, and homoeroticism (Pasin 2016; Schick 2004). At Ulucanlar Prison, they
were constitutive spaces for heightened awareness and visibility of gender and sexuality. In our trips
to the museum, however, the hammam was crowded with visitors, wandering through the small
structure and curiously investigating the equipment, such as towels and slippers. The walls changed
from one visit to another: once they were completely clean, then covered with graffiti, and finally
clean again. The space of the hammam occupies a significant position in the history and memory of
Ulucanlar Prison, because it was where juvenile inmates were sexually harassed and political pris-
oners were massacred. The audio guide and leaflets mention the hammam repeatedly without
addressing the brutal attacks that occurred there. It is presented as if it were any other hammam in
Ankara or elsewhere in Turkey. Those familiar with the history of the place understand that these
erasures, changes, and lost associations are part of the official strategy of the museum. Recent
graffiti, such as “Remember the Ulucanlar Massacre,” are evidence that visitors struggle to ensure
remembrance of violent acts the museum management attempts to erase, even though the
museum has preserved graffiti in wards that housed nonpolitical inmates.
Spatial consumption, renovation, and destruction epitomize the dominant strategies of (de)
gendered spatio-temporality at Ulucanlar Prison Museum. Throughout this research, we have
categorized the museum as an eclectically constructed site of memory/remembrance, hinging
upon distinctive strategies. Emptying, decontextualization, and assimilation were employed in
this institutional space to capture, accumulate, reallocate, confiscate, eradicate, rewrite, and/or
destroy the historical traces of gendered relationality in the prison, which stands as a monitory
example for historical prison museums in other sites under the control of hegemonic regimes.

Notes
1 Hospitals continue to segregate sexes, as they do not mix within individual rooms, but floors, cor-
ridors, and wards now commonly combine the sexes. .
2 Behice Boran, Sabiha Sertel, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Sevim Onursal, Ipek Çalışlar, and Leyla Zana can be
counted among these women. Behice Boran (1910–1987) was a sociologist, academic, and politician.
She was the last president of the Turkey Workers’ Party in 1970 and a representative of Turkey in
the European Parliament. She was imprisoned in Ulucanlar after the military coup in 1971. Sabiha
Sertel (1895–1968) was a leftist journalist who wrote on politics, society, and culture. She also
translated political and gender-related texts. She was arrested for her political views and imprisoned
in Ulucanlar for three months in 1945. Feride Çiçekoğlu (1951–) is a former female political pris-
oner, feminist writer, and academic who was arrested and held at Mamak Military Prison and Ulu-
canlar Prison from 1980 to 1984. Sevim Onursal (1926–2009) was a painter and artist who was
imprisoned in Ulucanlar Prison women’s unit. She was accused of hiding revolutionary . Deniz
Gezmiş (who was executed by the military junta in 1972) and his friend in her home. Ipek Çalışlar
(1947–) is a journalist and writer who was arrested and imprisoned for two years after the military
coup of March 12, 1971. Leyla Zana (1961–) is the first female Kurdish member of parliament in
Turkey and the first person to speak her oath in Kurdish in parliament. In 1994, she was arrested and
imprisoned in Ulucanlar for ten years.
 Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum 99

3 F-type prisons are cell blocks constructed for convicts with lengthy sentences, most of whom were
political prisoners. Their establishment encountered severe resistance from political prisoners, since
the inhumanly narrow cells did not let convicts live a healthy life. The isolation policies allowed only
three people to see each other at the same time. During hunger strikes against the F-type prisons
between 1999 and 2007, over 120 people died. After years of resistance, the isolation policies were
softened in 2007.
4 The reproductions of artist Sevim Onursal’s charcoal drawings of the women’s unit, the only physical
evidence of former female prisoners in the museum, were made visible thanks to a feminist intervention
by Berrin Alganer, Sevim Onursal’s daughter. She declared, “When I visited the museum, I worriedly
discussed the closure of the women’s ward with museum management; the museum gives the impression
that there were no women inmates except one or two whose names are mentioned. These gaps make it
difficult for contemporary visitors to understand the history of the museum site. So I donated a CD that
includes the copies of my mother’s drawings” to help remedy the situation (Sazak 2012). In this way, the
inner corridor bears witness to the prison museum’s construction, with its omission of gender partly
alleviated by a former inmate’s daughter’s donation.
5 Following respondents’ requests for confidentiality, we changed all names to pseudonyms. Transla-
tions of personal conversations are our own.
6 In his 1983 film Duvar (The Wall), director and screenwriter Yılmaz Güney portrayed this area as the
most unreachable place on the premises for inmates.
7 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian Ott (2010, 16) describe how affective investment and
intensity “produces, mediates and sustains emotional connection” (16). In this case, the spatial con-
tiguity or affiliation of diverse objects, photos, and names has the power to create a hegemonic
affective investment. .
8 The name of a single woman, Ipek Çalışlar, appears on the museum homepage, .and it is located next
to her husband’s. The list of famous former inmates includes three women, Ipek Çalışlar, Sabiha
Sertel, and Behice Boran, who are presented among the male inmates of the fifth ward (Altındağ
Municipality 2018).
9 For details, see Türk Mühendis ve Mimar Odaları Birliği Mimarlar Odası Ankara Şubesi [Union of
Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects Chamber of Architects Ankara Branch] (2007, 2010).

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Turkish Engineers and Architects Chamber of Architects Ankara Branch]. 2010. “Kent Düşleri Proje
Fikir 1 - Ulucanlar Merkez Kapalı Cezaevi Değerlendirme Projesi” [Urban Dreams Project Idea 1 –
Ulucanlar Central Prison Evaluation Project]. Ankara: TMMOB.
Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar [Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite]. 1989. Directed by Tunç Başaran. Istanbul:
Magnum Film.
Ünalın, Çetin, ed. 2010. Tanıkların Ulucanlar’ı: Sözlü Tarih [Witnesses’ Ulucanlar: Oral History]. Ankara:
TMMOB.
Welch, Michael. 2015. Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and The Pull of Punishment. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
9
DEATH OF A MUSEUM FORETOLD?
ON SEXUAL DISPLAY IN THE TIME OF
AIDS IN INDIA
Rovel Sequeira

“Were you influenced by Bhupen Khakhar?” I asked, referring to the celebrated Indian painter
whose work illuminated queer sexual experience and proletarian anomie in Mumbai in the
1980s, just before the AIDS crisis. My interviewee, Dr Prakash Sarang, was intrigued but non-
committal: “Bhupen Khakhar was a homo. His painting hides his inner voice. Suppose a man
was standing [there] and masturbating himself, that is totally different, right? I couldn’t go for that
with the general public” (2017a). Sarang, whom I met in June 2017, was the curator of Antar-
ang, a Mumbai-based exhibition gallery-cum-clinic billed as the first sex museum in India while
it existed from 2002–2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the relative lack of advertising for the
gallery and its location in a seedy part of town, I was unaware of its existence while growing up
in one of the city’s middle-class suburbs. Since then, the urban and sexual geographies of
Mumbai have drastically changed, affected by waves of migration, the proliferation of high rises
and slums, the AIDS crisis, and the emergence of queer politics. With the word Antarang con-
noting one’s intimate or inner self/body in Marathi (the local language), I hoped the museum
had the potential to queer Indian sexual discourse, despite the curator’s disavowal.
Before our interview, I perused reports indicating that Antarang’s exhibits were in storage
at the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society (MDACS), on the campus of a leprosy hos-
pital. My enthusiasm for access to these archives, ten years after the museum closed, was
quickly dispelled by layers of red tape and MDACS’ officials’ claims that while some former
exhibits had been crated, others had been discarded, and there were no records of any of
them. A senior official asserted that since institutional memory was short, nobody from the
time of Antarang’s operation was available to speak with me, although I was eventually given
Sarang’s number. My frustration at the lack of documentation echoed Jacques Derrida’s
(1996) notion of “archive fever,” the historian’s desire for unmediated access to the past. For
the supposed evidentiary security of official records, I had to substitute the uncertain territory
of journalistic reportage, interviews, and visitor comments. Consequently, my research
questions shifted, and I reflected on the conditions under which sexual publics are tenuously
made and unmade in postcolonial nation-states like India. The next chapter in this book
addresses different approaches to HIV/AIDS in the context of public history and museums in
a former colonial power, offering a counterpoint to this piece.
102 Rovel Sequeira

In this chapter,1 I investigate the historical conjunctures through which Antarang was
inaugurated in Mumbai’s red-light district, Kamathipura, in 2002. The museum catered to
a clientele including sex workers, their clients, and college students, but was shut down five
years later under the pretext of relocation to a more monsoon-ready building. I argue that
Antarang functioned as a hybrid site combining the governmental imperative of preventing
HIV transmission among sexually marginalized populations and the curator’s normative
liberal goals of providing mainstream audiences with scientific sex education. Tracking
debates about sex education, I contend that the museum’s precarious existence between the
requirements of public health and liberal activism illuminates the relationships between the
state, civil society, and political society in post-liberalization India, with the museum
operating as a fraught contact zone for the negotiation of these relationships. While inter-
rogating the aspirations of the museum’s curator to fashion a “modern” sexual subject
through a scientific idiom informed by national culture, I show that failure marked this
project, and I highlight its premature closure due to state neglect. I suggest that this failure
was a function of the spatial segregation of urban India that mapped onto the governmental
segregation of different groups, such as sex workers and their clients. These groups were
targets of specific but disparate biopolitical mechanisms meant to manage their susceptibility
to sexual risk. The technologies used to surveil the transmission of HIV in India among
diverse communities differentiate Indians into risky populations and at-risk citizens,
according to the styles of governance exercised by the state in relation to them. Magnified
by the increasing privatization of urban infrastructure in Mumbai, the effects of such spatial
and governmental segregations limit the access of marginalized groups to resources required
for sustaining radical sexual politics.

Old news: Case notes on Antarang

Flush with the millennial euphoria attending rapid Indian economic growth post-liberalization,
English-language newspapers covering Antarang’s launch in October 2002 hailed Mumbai’s
arrival on the world stage. Before the global economic depression in 2008, mainstream media
celebrated attempts at turning Mumbai into a city like Shanghai or even New York. “Mumbai
could have beaten New York to its exclusive museum on sex,” lamented a reporter, but “the
BMC [Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation] could not find someone to inaugurate it for the
last two years” (Chhina 2002). Lampooning the municipal bureaucracy, the reporter consoled
readers: “Doesn’t matter, the country’s most happening city has managed a permanent display
on the theme in an ancient building near Grant Road” (Chhina 2002). As a world-class city,
Mumbai deserved its own sex museum, another reporter suggested; this was its “sex and the
city” (Mukherjee 2007).
Reading between the lines, there is an evident uncertainty belying such aspirational rhetoric.
“Okay, so Lal Batti Dawakhana [Red Light Dispensary, Antarang’s location] is not exactly
Mumbai’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue,” admitted a reporter, emphasizing the rundown infra-
structure in the quarter (Chhina 2002). Running through these articles was a discourse of ima-
gined cosmopolitanism that both enabled the commensuration of Mumbai with the cultural
signs of globalism and threatened it. Was Mumbai in the same league as New York? Why had it
shunted its sex museum to a disreputable location when NYC advertised its avant-garde sex
museum from a Fifth Avenue storefront? Did Antarang even qualify as a sex museum? The site
lacked the appearance of a repository for objects constructing a storied national past like most
 Death of a Museum Foretold? 103

conventional museums in postcolonial nation-states (Anderson 2006). Antarang’s creator com-

missioned its exhibits to produce a crash course in sex education. Most articles stressed that the
site adjoined an STI/HIV testing clinic staffed by a state-employed chief medical officer,
although none characterized Antarang explicitly as an HIV/AIDS museum. Many emphasized
the “authenticity” of the sexual milieu of the space for tourists, stressing Antarang’s location and
claiming that sex workers frequented it (Desai 2013; Mukherjee 2007). Despite headlines like
“India’s first sex museum,” reports soberly foregrounded the museum’s primary function as
conveying information about STIs (Chadha 2002). As the story went, unlike the West, India
considered sex a taboo, and sexual issues were not discussed; this motivated authorities to open a
free sex museum to generate greater public awareness about STIs and HIV/AIDS (Chadha
2002). Moreover, while sex museums abroad were usually for-profit enterprises, Antarang was
the brainchild of the municipality and MDACS – “unlikely partners” in promoting sexual lib-
eralism (Bhattacharya 2002). Indeed, billboards cautiously announced Antarang as a “Sexual
Health Information Gallery.”2 More boldly, they also claimed that it offered “a positive view of
sex and safety involved in sexuality” (Mhasre 2007).
From sexual health to sex education to sexuality, the shifts in the imagined pedagogical impetus
of Antarang proceeded not just from category confusion or authorities’ wish to project Mumbai’s
cosmopolitanism. They also resulted from the disparate objects on exhibit and the discourses
mobilized to frame them. Photographs from Sarang and newspaper articles helped me reconstruct
the broad parameters of various exhibits. Specifically, a wooden staircase in a dilapidated building
led past the STI testing clinic to the gallery containing more than twenty exhibits. The entrance
comprised a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of a book framed by male and female figures. Panels
with shlokas from the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana and the play Kumarasambhavam by Sanskrit dramatist
Kalidasa (written in the romantic kavya tradition) were placed inside near the entrance. A counse-
lor-cum-museum guide said it was “like entering the Harry Potter book,” conveying its fantastical
elements (quoted in J. Shah n.d.). These cutouts framed the exhibition within the erotic traditions
of Indian myth, literature, and history, from indigenous Warli paintings to terracotta reproductions
of sculptures of unnamed “Indian sex goddesses” of the Indus valley civilization, to the lingam or
phallus symbolizing the god Shiva (Chadha 2002). The motile sperm painted on the floor led to a
pair of (female and male) mannequins embracing each other, fiberglass wings trailing from their
backs connoting flights of romantic fancy.
These exhibits emblematized Indian heritage, presenting Antarang as a site of public
instruction and entertainment; further on, the visitor encountered exhibits on human
reproduction and STIs, coded in the supposedly neutral discourse of medical science.
Painted plaster models of the process of reproduction post-conception to childbirth
adorned antiseptic green walls, documenting the growth of the fetus in explicit clinical
detail. While full replicas of fetuses were exhibited, only pelvic sections of the female
models appeared, mirroring iconographic traditions of anatomy textbooks.3 The adjoining
section foregrounded the prevalence of STIs and HIV/AIDS in India, conveying relevant
statistics. Two spheres were presented on either side of a low platform, the first, a full
pincushion, representing the thorniness of the AIDS crisis, and the second, a globe, repre-
senting its worldwide dimensions. Described as a “horror show” by one newspaper, this
section consisted of panels covered with gruesomely explicit pictures of body parts
(including genitals) affected by various diseases, in order to instill avoidance of “risky” sex
(Bhattacharya 2002). Details about STI treatment were generally absent. The climate of
fear regarding STIs and HIV/AIDS was cemented by the final exhibit: a walk-in coffin.
104 Rovel Sequeira

FIGURE 9.1 Skeletons in the Closet. Antarang Museum, Mumbai

Source: Courtesy of Prakash Sarang.

With mirrors on its internal surfaces, the coffin interpellated the visitor as the subject/
object of HIV/AIDS, a potential future patient suffering from a terminal illness: “That’s what
you walk into through unprotected sex,” said Sarang (quoted in Bhattacharya 2002).

On sexual enlightenment: The education of health and desire

A survey of the exhibited artifacts makes Antarang’s drive to promote awareness about HIV/
AIDS evident. That the museum ensured better testing and treatment through the provision of
an on-site clinic was commendable. However, the exhibits focused solely on anatomical effects
of the HIV/AIDS-complex, rather than on stories of people living with HIV/AIDS or on
treatments. They perpetuated the “emotional habitus” (Gould 2009, 10) of fear already publicly
associated with STIs in order to promote abstinence, or at best, heterosexual monogamy, as a
preventive, thereby reifying ideals of sexually normative behavior. Defining emotional habitus as
the “socially constituted, prevailing ways of feeling and emoting, as well as the embodied, axio-
matic understandings and norms about feelings and their expression,” sociologist Deborah Gould
shows how moments in the history of HIV/AIDS activism in the USA since the 1980s were
associated with particular emotional states (2009, 10). Ranging from fear to shame to anger, these
 Death of a Museum Foretold? 105

emotions constrained the political discourses that were championed by activist organizations (10).
Gould’s concept is useful in framing the climate in which Antarang operated, even though no
similar transition through fear, shame, and anger is evident. Rather, fear continued to dominate
the rhetorical landscape of HIV/AIDS in India in the early 2000s even as the media promoted
education/awareness about HIV transmission and safe sex to discourage sexual misconceptions.
For instance, according to the Indian Express, the coffin exhibit had the final word in Antarang’s
sex ed book display, preaching that “generations of people affected by the disease are featured in
this book, even our generation will be one among them. What one needs to do is educate and
practice safe sex” (J. Shah n.d.).
Both enabled and constrained by discursive and institutional paradigms fueled by HIV/
AIDS, Antarang appears exceptional in light of the controversy that developed over the
introduction of sex education in all public schools. Given the increased incidence of HIV
among twelve to nineteen-year-old students, and following recommendations by the
World Health Organization (WHO), the Ministry of Human Resources and Development
collaborated with the National AIDS Control Program to introduce an Adolescent Education
Program (AEP) in central government schools in 2006. A year later, it was made compulsory in
all public schools, leading to an outcry from right- and left-wing parties that “western countries
[were] … spoiling the younger generation” (Khir and Sonowane 2007). In the aftermath,
Hasan Mushrif, Minister of State for Education, pulled sex education manuals from schools,
and sex education was banned in eleven states, including Maharashtra and its capital, Mumbai
(Khir and Sonowane 2007).
While Antarang’s existence may appear extraordinary in this context, any uncritical
celebration must be taken with a grain of salt. Paromita Chakravarti aptly notes that
“although this debate is increasingly being represented as one in which progressive forces
are pushing the cause of sex education while the conservatives are resisting it … sex
education per se cannot be a progressive project” (2011, 390). Informational discourses
about bodily functions “often become a means of reinforcing moralistic norms of behavior,
gender stereotypes and an unquestioning acceptance of institutions like class, family and mar-
riage” (Chakravarti 2011, 390). Indeed, in curating scientific models of human anatomy and its
reproductive functions, Antarang recalls the Ladies’ Anatomy museum in late nineteenth-century
New York, where women were invited to view models of the female anatomy and to visit
doctors who held office hours on site to have their “freakish” reproductive organs examined
(Tyburczy 2016, 15). Although Antarang did not focus primarily on the female body,4 its
scientific exhibits relied upon starkly gendered post-Darwinian views of men and women as
“opposite sexes” that hardened during the late nineteenth century, influencing the spatial layout
of public institutions. Following museum studies scholar Jennifer Tyburczy (2016), it is useful to
recall Sara Ahmed’s claim that bodies do not simply inhabit sexual spaces but are sexualized by
the ways in which they inhabit space (67–69). The arrangement of objects and representations in
normative spaces directs the presumed heterosexuality of its audience toward the “end point” of
coupling with the opposite sex (67–68).
Rather than merely interrogating specific details in curatorial narratives of Antarang, I
foreground the supposedly neutral idiom of science on which they draw. This idiom is cap-
able of generating representations that are more or less progressive depending on those
representations’ legibility within evolutionary schema. For instance, Sarang states that he is
against monogamy for both men and women from a biological standpoint. He claims that
India only acquired a “culture” that valorized monogamy recently, with the ideal of the
106 Rovel Sequeira

warrior king Ram and his chaste wife Sita replacing that of the sexually adventurous Krishna:
“During this era [of] HIV … Ram is right wing but people will like to be Krishna. Inside
you there is a Krishna. . . . We are not monogamous, and polygamy is not restricted only to
men” (Sarang 2017a). Simultaneously, however, Sarang suggests that culture and biology
cannot be separated, as tradition acquires an instrumental value in the fight against risky
behaviors. He clarifies that HIV “was going to spread and that was the phobia. So we have to
change our habits to become like Ram and Sita and have one woman and one [man] … like
penguins. They have only one mate for lifetime” (Sarang 2017a). Even though tradition is
coded as a fight against risky behaviors rather than against particular identities, non-normative
identities are subtly policed by the models of safer sex promoted. Such instrumental uses of
tradition are largely unthreatening to right-wing organizations; in Sarang’s words, “there was
no objection from the greatest Hindu extremist” (2017a).
Crucially, Sarang did not contend that Antarang was a sex museum, claiming prior
knowledge of only the one in Amsterdam. Sex museums, Sarang argued, were “not related
to this information gallery. . . . Ours was the first in Asia and the first to give information
regarding sexuality and health-related things.” This disavowal was not the result of personal
prudishness; for him, there was “nothing wrong in having a sex museum like that. But [to]
curb the infection at that time you [had] to make them understand what is [HIV] and how it
gets transmitted” (2017a). While for Sarang, the specificity of Antarang was its urgent peda-
gogical impetus, he affirmed that, in practice, it was a hybrid creation by artists, medical
officers, guides, counselors, and NGO workers. Artistic representation supplemented the
governmental surveillance and control of HIV; Sarang emphasized, “[o]therwise itna mazaa
nahi hai [there is not as much fun in it]. . . . It has to be presented in an aesthetic way. Ganda
nahin [Not dirty/obscene]” (2017a). The Hindi word ganda, meaning both dirty and obscene,
recalls the role of taste as a form of cultural capital and social distinction (Bourdieu 1984).
Quotations from the Kamasutra or the Kumarasambhavam valorize a degree of erotic freedom so
long as its provenance from “tasteful” Indian tradition can be established. If this potentially
liberal view of sex seems to contradict HIV/AIDS-related public health goals, it is harmonized
with the latter by the use of an esoteric language like Sanskrit, which is all but illegible to the
lay visitor. Consequently, tradition has little practical instructional value although it remains
useful as symbolic capital. As Tyburczy argues in another context, the twin vocabularies of taste
and heritage excise “certain kinds of sex from public view … by proposing the idea that [only]
some sex was tasteful and thus displayable” (2016, 28). The vocabularies reinforce binary
oppositions of high and low culture, art and pornography, respectability and contagion. In
Mumbai, such oppositions are reinforced by association with particular sites and bodies.

In the red light district: The museum as contact zone

Early news articles framed Antarang against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, which had already
affected millions and was likely to achieve epidemic proportions.5 The crisis first gained attention
in 1986 when ten of 102 female sex workers in Chennai were found to be HIV-positive. The
earliest confirmed cases were concentrated in south and west India, in Chennai and Mumbai,
respectively (Verma et al. 2004, 21). Indian politicians underplayed its significance in the 1980s
and early 1990s, claiming that AIDS was a “Western” disease affecting homosexuals and “pro-
miscuous” individuals, leaving Indians relatively unscathed because of their supposedly less risky
behavior (21). When the National AIDS Control Organization was established in 1992 to
 Death of a Museum Foretold? 107

coordinate local and transnational HIV monitoring organizations centrally, the Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare was already distributing information, education, and communication
(IEC) materials concerning HIV/AIDS. Through the 1990s, the focus was on medical solutions
rather than on frank public discourse about sexuality (Ramasubban 1998, 2865). Instead of
developing a nationwide integrated health program, governmental organizations, alongside the
NGOs that mushroomed post-liberalization, focused on policing “high-risk populations” like
sex workers, and, later, on MSM or men-who-have-sex-with-men (Boyce 2007, 183; Rama-
subban 1998, 2865). By 1993–1994, there was an alarming 52 percent increase in HIV-positive
cases among Mumbai sex workers, and health policy focused on men who frequented them
regularly (Verma et al. 2004, 24).
As Svati Shah (2014) has shown, during this period civil society and NGO anti-trafficking dis-
courses converged with the “AIDS industry” to highlight Kamathipura as a singular locus of
prostitution, thereby equating brothel-based sex work with all prostitution per se. Despite efforts by
NGOs to encourage a focus on risky behaviors rather than risk groups, the figure of the prostitute
as responsible for spreading contagion was cemented through public health campaigns and sensa-
tional “prostitution reporting” (S. Shah 2006, 279). Kamathipura was produced as a paradigmatic
“risk zone,” with sex work technically criminalized, but in practice, embedded within complex
informal economies involving indefinite and irregular forms of bribery (hafta), protection, and
intimidation by city police and local merchants (139–140). Svati Shah suggests that such economies
create the conditions for particularly fraught gendered forms of what Partha Chatterjee (2004) calls
“political society.” On the margins of civil society, political society comprises certain groups – like
sex workers – which are understood by the state more as populations than as citizens. These groups
stake their claim to livelihood and habitation by sublegal means as a matter of right, allowing them
tenuous existences in the interstices of multiple governmental regimes (S. Shah 2014). As historian
Ashwini Tambe (2009) indicates, this governmental and spatial segregation is only the newest
chapter in the construction of Kamathipura as a policed “vice zone,” since it was produced as
a racially segregated enclave by the British government in late nineteenth-century Bombay to
regulate the colonial military’s access to disease-free sexual commerce.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Sarang (then a government medical officer) and NGO teams reached
out to sex workers for whom they designed IEC materials and conducted lectures at schools and
colleges across Mumbai. While sex workers were considered an epidemiological high-risk group,
Sarang resisted seeing them as exceptional carriers of risk, focusing also on mainstream youth and
working class communities. Yet he could not offer the same instruction in all spaces. When I
inquired if he provided information on non-vaginal sex to college students, Sarang demurred: “No,
generally we didn’t … because there was a feeling sometimes something wrong happens, you
know” (2017a). But, in the case of sex workers, he confirmed, “for them we teach all the things”
(2017a). Unsurprisingly, then, although such initiatives claim to foreground risky behaviors rather
than risk groups, their assumptions about where such behaviors are localized reinforce the connection
with group identity. Areas where sex workers operate, such as Kamathipura, become exceptional
“sites of erotic danger” (Singer 1993, 10), contributing to the stigmatization of sex workers and
constructing mainstream audiences as at risk rather than risky. Consequently, from the public health
standpoint that preoccupied Sarang, the spread of HIV would be invisible among the latter. For him,
it was important that the museum educate a range of visitors, “not just sex workers but joh bhi aata tha
[whoever used to come]” (Sarang 2017a). Indeed, Sarang says that Antarang was “primarily meant
for students and young people,” going so far as to claim (somewhat disingenuously) that the
museum’s location near Kamathipura was coincidental (quoted in Bhattacharya 2002).
108 Rovel Sequeira

Despite Sarang’s disclaimer, Antarang may be read as a contact zone bringing together risk
groups that were normally understood as distinct. Contact zones, Mary Louise Pratt tells us,
are “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and histori-
cally separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually
involving … radically asymmetrical relations of power” (1992, 6–7). Drawing on this con-
cept, James Clifford insists that despite the asymmetries that museums often illustrate and
reproduce, exhibitionary institutions have the potential to destabilize conventional notions of
center and periphery and to produce “ongoing stories of struggle” (1997, 193). In this regard,
reports highlighting Antarang’s role in educating sex workers provide insight into the muse-
um’s intervention in the local HIV/AIDS economy. A Reuters article notes that the museum
“is drawing hundreds of prostitutes and their regular clients who say they learn more about
HIV/AIDS from its graphic exhibits than staid lectures on safe sex” (Mukherjee 2007). M. G.
Vallecha, a medical officer at the adjacent clinic, concurred that Antarang “became popular
among prostitutes and some of their clients after health workers began taking them there”
(Mukherjee 2007). Sex workers claimed to gain the ability to refuse sex without condoms
following a visit to Antarang (2007). The museum thus reportedly offered a location where
sex workers availed themselves of health services, prompting us to speculate whether it could
also have led them to create organizations like the radical sex worker collectives in Kolkata
(West Bengal) and in Sangli (Maharashtra). There, prevention and education efforts, includ-
ing condom distribution and condom use policies, were enforced by sex workers in entire
localities. However, reports also suggested that the very association of Antarang’s location
with illicitness kept away visitors from “mainstream society” (2007). “The area where the
museum is located is stigmatized,” an official noted, “and even if they [tourists] want to
come they don’t because they don’t want to be seen in a red light district” (2007). The
term mainstream, however, does not function as a stable descriptive signifier; rather, analysis
of the ways in which visitors perceive and style themselves in response to the museum’s
interpellation produce divergent value-bearing meanings of being mainstream.

Visitors in the record: From audience to public?

Museum exhibition policies frequently generate normative horizons of interpretation for visitors.
Yet visitors are not “empty vessels waiting to be filled” with curatorial meaning (Coffee 2013,
163). They bring patterns of socialization, ways of thinking and interpretation, and normative
values of their own to the museum (2013, 163). Along these lines, communications studies
scholar Katherine Sender (2017) sees museumgoers as participants rather than passive audiences,
theorizing visitors as publics constituted by temporarily shared dialogue and discourse. Visitor
comments books are important sites from which to map the parameters of such discourse.
In Antarang’s case, the visitors’ log was not public, and I acquired mere fragments from Sarang;
the rest were lost. Nevertheless, basic facts may be ascertained. Assuming 400–500 monthly
visitors from October 2002 onwards, as news reports suggest, only a minute fraction – around
225 individuals – commented in the log from 2002 to 2004 (aggregated in 210 entries).
Approximately 160 entries are in English, thirty-three in Marathi, ten in Hindi, and two in
Urdu. About thirteen of the commenters are representatives of government schools, like teachers
or principals, presumably accompanying students. Fifteen sign themselves as college students. Six
are journalists, mostly from English-language newspapers. More than a third of the comments,
around eighty, are by NGO-affiliated social workers involved in HIV/AIDS issues or education
 Death of a Museum Foretold? 109

or municipal staff associated with the public health department. About forty of them are
signed as “Dr” specifying their roles as medical practitioners at various institutions. About ten
were from the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI) or the US-based Population
Services International (PSI).
While Antarang’s records allow for statistically aggregating visitors by their institutional
locations, the comments prove unreliable sources for analysis. Commenters are not necessarily
representative, and many feel more comfortable sharing positive feedback instead of criticism
(Pekarik 1997). Most of the 225 commenters approved of Antarang. While many made
suggestions for its amelioration, only a single one, Mr G. G., criticized the museum’s vision:
“Very informative. Little less stress on Morals would do. Are Sanyasis the Image of Self
Control? Like to know more about the AIDS disease itself for the present development [of]
means to fight it back.” The comments, nevertheless, are useful in identifying the field of
responses elicited by the exhibition, as well as the shared interpretive vocabularies through
which the experience was read – precisely those elements which constitute the boundaries,
however tenuous, of what Michael Warner (2002) calls publicness.
While visitors concurred that the information conveyed by the museum was valuable, only a
few used the first-person pronoun to claim that the museum was personally useful to them. Others
advocated use of the museum by members of another segment of society using the third-person
pronoun. Around eighteen prescribed use of Antarang for schoolchildren, while sixteen recom-
mended it for “youth [tarun]” or “young men and women [yuvak yuvati].” Eight suggested that
the museum would benefit adult men and women or married persons, and two, for those who
engaged in unsafe practices. Three specifically advocated expanded use by “rural/tribal sector[s],”
with one suggesting that the museum needed to reach the “rural mob,” and a couple calling for
the museum to start mobile units like health vans or traveling theaters to reach the city’s hinter-
lands. Two called for the museum’s expansion to the suburbs and other Indian states. Finally,
about twelve indicated that the museum would benefit educators, researchers, NGO staff, or
medical personnel. Not a single commenter identified openly as a sex worker or individual
marginalized because of their sexual identity, possibly due to non/semi-literacy and lack of access
to cultural capital, problems the museum intended to circumvent by stressing visual learning. An
overwhelming number focused on the museum’s intervention in the fight against HIV trans-
mission; one visitor, Mr S. P., grimly noted: “Zagaava ki Maraava Ha Ek Prashna [To Live or to
Die, that is the Question]. . . . To be or Not to Be.”
What inferences can be drawn from this fragmentary evidence? Must one argue, as one
Mrs S. C. did in October 2004, that the museum contained “Comprehensive, creative,
scientific information,” and thus was a “Must for all CONCERNED CITIZENS”? I
would argue that, given the dominance of comments from personnel involved in the
“AIDS industry,” the log provides more insight into the ethos of a managerial civil society
that produces areas of concern for middle class citizens than into Antarang’s intended
audiences. This is not to suggest that the museum failed to intervene in the fight against
HIV/AIDS. Some commenters were effusive about the personal impact of the functional
information about human anatomy provided by Antarang. The excessive affect in their
comments gestured toward a utopian space where talk about sexual practices could circu-
late freely. But the process of archiving highlighted the voices of those who adopted a
pedagogical posture, at best, in relation to vaguely defined societal groups like “youth,”
“students,” or the “common mass,” and at worst, in relation to imagined others who were
(supposedly) in greater need of the museum than themselves. Thus, if we see Antarang’s
110 Rovel Sequeira

visitor log as simply illustrating the contours of its public, we risk universalizing Haberma-
sian notions of the bourgeois argumentative public sphere (Fraser 1990, 60–61). In India,
where access to education and dominant cultural languages cannot be assumed, such uni-
versalization prevents us from understanding alternative modes through which subalterns
seek entry into public life (60–61). Following Chaim Noy (2008), then, one may under-
stand visitor books as staging performances of dialogue between and among curators and
visitors. From this perspective, many, even most, commenters saw themselves as collec-
tively participating in a national project of sexual pedagogy for others who were at risk. Such
a response encouraged little critique of the museum’s limitations. Still, one may speculate
about Antarang’s potential for enabling more radical measures – like onsite condom
distribution, which one visitor recommended – had it not been shut.

On failure
Without a complete record, attempts to reconstruct Antarang’s closure may partially be an
exercise in failure. From the visitors’ book, it appears that the lack of publicity was a concern.
Visitors criticized the absence of signage in English and Hindi, since the written content was
mostly in Marathi. An additional concern was the lack of parking space, but chiefly, officials
believed that “people, mostly college students, are too embarrassed to come here” (Mhasre
2007). Yet neither lack of publicity nor linguistic shortcomings or continuing taboos suffi-
ciently explain the museum’s closure. A city daily stated that Antarang was shifted to another
location due to damage caused by the monsoon (2007). Another suggested that the museum
was shut down under the pretext of relocating it. This report states that the building “was
handed over to a private developer for redevelopment” (Desai 2013). In 2014, a local
TV channel observed that the building had been demolished and an office tower had
risen in its place (Dixit 2014). The report also circulated rumors about plans to move
the museum to Goa given Mumbai’s apparent disinterest, but admitted that this plan
existed only on paper (2014). An aura of failure surrounded attempts to revive the
museum, though Sarang, who resigned from his government job as medical officer,
retained hope that the museum might be reborn: “I don’t want it with the govern-
ment. I mean I should get it in the private sector. If I got Bill Gates’ backing wouldn’t
it be great?” (2017a).
In the current hyper-conservative climate regarding sex education, it seems unlikely that
the museum will reopen, certainly not in Kamathipura. As Svati Shah (2014) observes,
Kamathipura has become the haven of developers since 2007, when Antarang closed down.
Landlords have evicted many tenants, and leases have been bought out by private developers
at less-than-fair prices (2014). From fifty thousand (or thirty thousand, or ten thousand,
depending on rumor), the number of sex workers in Kamathipura has decreased to fewer
than two thousand, and they are increasingly targeted by police raids presented as anti-traf-
ficking. As Shah writes, “with this stability [of brothel-based residence and sex work] under
attack through raids and slum demolitions, and with the conditions of rural poverty and
urban migration intensifying, conditions now exist for less visible forms of sexual commerce
to expand” (184–185). Shah concludes, “this will make [HIV/AIDS] prevention and inter-
vention efforts more difficult” (185). News articles speak of the end of the distinctive life of
Kamathipura with nostalgia, some writing its eulogy: “What AIDS couldn’t do, a real estate
boom is doing” (Sinha 2012).
 Death of a Museum Foretold? 111

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarang dreamt of moving Antarang to Goa with private investment,
equipping it with “five-star hotel-like facilities,” as a “Honeymoon’s Paradise” for holidaying
young couples (2017a). There remained little possibility of the museum benefiting sex workers,
semi-literate audiences, or students. Nor would it remain free of charge. To theorize this shift as
one from state-sponsored patronage to one subject to the vagaries of the market and private
capital would be simplistic. The transnational regimes of NGO-driven governmentality fueled
by the spread of HIV/AIDS at least partially contributed to a shift toward neoliberal economics.
Yet, as Jennifer Tyburczy has shown, the pressures of private capital and the urban tourist market
increasingly influence the possibility for the display of sex. In the last two decades, sex museums
in Australia, South Korea, the USA, and France closed after a few years, unable to compete as
public entertainment businesses (Tyburczy 2016, 32). If museums retain any possibilities, often
despite themselves, of queering sexual discourse, “they [must] do so within a political and eco-
nomic paradigm where business concerns dominate the domain of the sayable” (207). In the
interim, radical sexual politics in India await a more robust infrastructure.

Notes
1 I wish to thank Ania Loomba and Heather Love, who, alongside the editors of this volume, read and
commented on multiple drafts of this chapter.
2 Text from photograph and reports conveyed to the author in personal communication (Sarang 2017b).
3 This tradition dates back to gynecological and obstetric medical studies of the early nineteenth cen-
tury, conveying (male) scientific authority over representations of female bodies while rendering the
mother visually secondary to the fetus. See Youngquist (2008).
4 See Laqueur (1990). Although Antarang did exhibit a small sculpture of ardhanaarishwara (the half-
male, half-female form of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati) as a nod to Indian “tradition,” this
figure is more a culturally sanctioned representation of gender fluidity than of sexual non-
normativity.
5 Ironically, in 2006, estimates of Indians infected with HIV were drastically revised from 5.2 million
to nearly half that number (Cleeson and Alexander 2008).

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10
LOST OBJECTS AND MISSING HISTORIES
HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands

Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

Curators and theorists have described HIV/AIDS as one of the most culturally productive
phenomena of modern times (Goldstein 1990, 295–310). Responses to AIDS include a rich
array of film, literature, visual and performance art, and protest and educational materials,
used in activism, expressing grief, memorializing the dead, or providing public health
information. Museums regularly draw on the most iconic of these objects, from the art of
ACT UP or panels of the AIDS quilt, to a wide range of HIV-prevention posters. Exhi-
bitions are typically mounted to mark World AIDS Day in December each year, com-
monly including photographic portraits of people living with AIDS in different
circumstances and disparate settings all over the world. In the last five years there has also
been a wider resurgence of scholarly research and museum projects “revisiting” the past and
the legacies of the pandemic today.1
Despite the breadth of the material traces of HIV/AIDS, just a few types of objects are most
often displayed in museums and art galleries, shaping the narratives of this history in significant
ways. Much of the material culture that museums would need to enrich their accounts and to
represent diverse perspectives on the pandemic remains unidentified and out of reach. The
Netherlands is an instructive example of how the history of HIV/AIDS is being limited, and
how heritage is being lost, despite the widespread recognition of the local, national, and global
significance of the pandemic.2 The Dutch epidemic has a very different history than the story of
government neglect, stigma, homophobia, and radical activism told elsewhere (in the USA, UK,
and France, for example), and as a result, a different cultural legacy in terms of heritage preserved
and museum projects undertaken. In this chapter we consider the context for the under-
representation of HIV/AIDS in Dutch archives, museums, and exhibitions and discuss strategies
to address the problem. This chapter presents a more detailed and specific case relating to sexu-
ality, health, and Dutch museums than those discussed in other chapters of this book. We argue
that a lack of urgency regarding the collection and exhibition of the material culture of this his-
tory has led to the loss and destruction of significant objects, and that existing collections cannot
adequately represent the diversity of experiences in the past or the ongoing challenges.
We begin with an overview of the historical context of the emergence of HIV/AIDS in
the Netherlands and consider how the trajectory of the epidemic influenced the collection
114 Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

and exhibition of heritage by museums and archives. We then focus on absences created by
the collection policies of archives and museums, as well as the loss of specific objects. We
examine a range of strategies to address these issues, including oral histories, a digital scrap-
book project, and an AIDS Cultures festival held in conjunction with the 22nd International
AIDS Conference in Amsterdam in July 2018.3 In conclusion, we reflect on the ongoing
challenges of HIV/AIDS and how they relate to the collection and exhibition of its history.

Historical context
The first cases of what would later be known as AIDS were identified in the Netherlands
in the same year as in the United States, 1981 (aidsfonds 2018a). The Dutch media
response matched the American one, with an emphasis on a mysterious “gay disease”
(homoziekte) – although this was a term used by journalists rather than medical professionals
(“Nieuwe ‘Homo-Ziekte Eist Eerste Slachtoffer,” or “New Homosexual Disease Claims its
First Victim,” in de Volkskrant and “Ernstige virusziekte bedreigt actieve homo,” or “Severe
Virus Threatens Active Homosexuals,” quoted in Mooij 2004, 2). The Dutch also expected
a rapidly rising death toll, but the scale of the epidemic was far less severe than in the USA.
In contrast to the conservative Republican government there, Dutch politicians reacted
relatively quickly – instigated by pressure from gay rights organizations, public health
advisors, and physicians treating the first patients to be diagnosed. These groups worked
together from the early stages in a Dutch model of consensus-building known as the polder
system, whereby representatives of different groups agree on a joint approach. By colla-
borating to co-design the public health strategy, they presented a calm and constructive
approach to problem-solving, although there were some internal tensions. This approach
was deliberately intended to prevent the media hysteria and stigmatization of gay men that
occurred elsewhere, especially in the UK, and indeed, the general population of the
Netherlands remained largely unconcerned about HIV (Duyvendak 1996, 422–424). In
fact, despite fears that an epidemic would undermine the movement for gay equality, the
homophobia seen in the USA did not materialize as aggressively in the Netherlands, and
some, including historian Annet Mooij and HIV/AIDS virologist Roel Coutinho, have
argued that the epidemic bolstered the movement for gay emancipation (Kromhout 2001;
Mooij 2004, 196).
The transformative role of AIDS activists that is widely acknowledged in US histories is
similarly recognized among physicians and medical researchers in the Netherlands. As Mooij
has written in Geen Paniek! [Don’t Panic!] AIDS in Nederland 1982–2004, originally published as
Baas Over de Eigen Epidemie (In Charge of Their Epidemic), gay organizations played a leading role
in the response (2004, 196). Sven Danner, a well-known AIDS physician, has also underlined
the impact of patients on Dutch healthcare (aan de Stegge 2018). Close cooperation
undoubtedly saved lives and challenged stigmatization, as well as facilitating new forms of
patient participation and agency in the design and evaluation of treatments. However, it had
limits as well as benefits (Mooij 2004, 27–28). Some medical professionals were critical of the
consensus-based approach, arguing that the government did not dare to impose certain mea-
sures to fight the epidemic for fear of angering powerful LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. Cou-
tinho, whose 1985 study showed that 30 percent of his trial group had tested positive for HIV,
unsuccessfully called for a tougher approach and criticized the government’s refusal to close gay
bathhouses and other venues known for anonymous sex (Mooij 2004, 28).
 HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 115

Yet the official response was, nevertheless, timid about advocating safe sex. While
policymakers eschewed the deliberately frightening health education messages of the
UK government, using imagery of a buzzing bee moving between different flowers to
imply multiple sex partners rather than the tombstones and icebergs of the infamous
English “Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign, they promoted no sex rather than safe sex
and did not refer to condoms as a way to prevent infection until 1987. Activist Martijn
van de Kerkhof complained in 1992 (40–41) that policymakers lulled the public into a
false sense of security and deliberately discouraged activism. As sociologist Jan Willem Duy-
vendak concluded (1996, 421–424), while HIV/AIDS contributed to the radicalization of gay
movements elsewhere, in the Netherlands it contributed to their depoliticization, with gay
activists settling for the model of limited tolerance enjoyed at home in comparison to the
intolerance of other countries.
This lack of activism has implications for collecting and exhibiting the history of HIV/
AIDS. First, as there was less protest, there were fewer related materials to preserve. While
such items make up a substantial portion of the holdings in museums and archives in the
UK, France, and the USA, they are less prevalent in the Netherlands. Moreover, during
the early years of the Dutch epidemic, there seems to have been a lack of urgency
regarding the need to document activities as events unfolded. This is in contrast to other
settings, where activists, as well as historians, noted their awareness of living through an
important moment in history and their motivation to record it.4 Furthermore, this lack of
urgency has translated into a sense of complacency now that HIV/AIDS is seen as a man-
ageable health condition rather than a life-threatening illness and as less of a problem than
in other countries. Yet more than one thousand people are newly registered as HIV-posi-
tive annually, adding to the more than nineteen thousand people known to be infected in
the Netherlands as of 2017 (van Sighem et al. 2017).
Another reason for the limited attention to the history of HIV/AIDS in the Nether-
lands is the broader neglect of LGBTQ+ histories and the histories of other marginalized
groups in Dutch archives and museums.5 Gay men remain the largest HIV-positive group
in the Netherlands, and so the history of HIV/AIDS would logically include a primary
focus on them, although other affected groups, such as heterosexual people of color,
people with hemophilia, drug users, and men who have sex with men but do not
identify as gay, are commonly underrepresented (van Sighem et al. 2017). Collecting and
interpreting this history has been undermined by the Dutch self-image and its con-
sequences for public history work. This includes the problematic assumption that the
Netherlands has a progressive stance on homosexuality, as evidenced by Amsterdam’s
fame as a gay mecca since the 1970s and the country’s status as the first in the world to
legalize gay marriage in 2002.6
This Dutch self-image plays a significant role in the underrepresentation of LGBTQ+
experience in archives and museums (as well as in history education and public history
training), with cultural professionals, educators, and students commonly arguing that there
is no need to focus on this group as they are not marginalized, that such a focus would
“politicize” mainstream history – and that by implication, mainstream history is not politi-
cized.7 Stakeholders at archives and museums argue, moreover, that institutions focused on
LGBTQ+ history are primarily responsible for this work, a position that reflects the con-
tradictions created by the polder model with its reliance on self-representation for each
specific group.
116 Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

Lonneke van den Hoonaard, director of IHLIA (Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch Informatie-

centrum en Archief, translated as the International Gay/Lesbian Information Center and
Archive), Europe’s oldest and largest such institute, regularly confronts the issues this con-
text creates (2017). Cultural professionals visiting from the UK and USA are often surprised
to learn that IHLIA receives structural funds from the Dutch government, but then to
discover, as van den Hoonaard (2015) explains, that “LGBT history still is a large blind spot
in many museums … other institutions do not see it as their business.” In fact, when she
has lobbied cultural professionals to pay more attention to such histories in their own
venues, they often reply, “isn’t that what you are for?” Apart from the fact that IHLIA does
not have high enough levels of funding to take primary responsibility for preserving and
interpreting all of the country’s relevant history, van den Hoonaard prefers that queer pasts
not be “segregated from the rest,” and instead urges others to take up aspects of this history
as part of their usual programming (2015).
IHLIA is one of the instigators of an initiative to shift attitudes and policies in this area,
known as Queering the Collections, a network to promote the collection and interpretation
of LGBTQ+ heritage and histories (IHLIA LGBT Heritage 2018b). The group has had some
success, securing startup funding from the Amsterdam City Council, as well as the active
participation of representatives from major cultural institutions including the Amsterdam City
Archive and Amsterdam Museum (formerly the Amsterdam History Museum), together with
academic partners training students to work in exhibition design and public history at the
Reinwardt Academy and the University of Amsterdam. Projects include special exhibitions at
museums and archives, an annual cultural festival held during Gay Pride since 2016, public
symposia, and events.8 In December 2016, the first AIDS monument in the Netherlands was
dedicated in Amsterdam, accompanied by an exhibition at IHLIA and renewed attention to
the history of HIV/AIDS in the Dutch press (Hofman 2016; IHLIA LGBT Heritage 2018a).9
Members of the Queering the Collections network also prepared cultural activities to
coincide with the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam in July 2018.

Current collections: Future recommendations

Prior to this recent flurry of interest in LGBTQ+ histories, HIV/AIDS had not received much
attention as a focus for collections development or public projects, especially outside of art set-
tings. Gallery exhibitions included a recurring series of projects at the Stedelijk Museum in the
1990s, organized in conjunction with World AIDS Day, as well as an exhibition of photo-
graphy at Huis Marseille in 2007.10 Exhibitions of portrait photography are a common
feature of World AIDS Day activities globally, and several have been shown at locations
across the Netherlands.11 As much of the existing scholarship on HIV/AIDS and museums
focuses predominantly on art exhibitions, our discussion here examines other kinds of museum
projects – notably medical or social histories, and the challenges of locating and accessioning a
broader array of material culture to document the pandemic. An analysis of these exhibitions will
be used to inform some concluding suggestions of new avenues for collecting and display.
In the Netherlands, the first historical exhibition outside of an art gallery was held in 2001.
The project was titled Van Pest tot AIDS: Vijf Eeuwen Besmettelijke Ziekten in Amsterdam (From
Plague to AIDS: Five Centuries of Contagious Diseases in Amsterdam), and was undertaken to mark
the centenary of the GGD, Geneeskundige en Gezondheidsdienst (Medical and Public Health Ser-
vice of Amsterdam). Van Pest tot AIDS focused on Amsterdam society’s reactions to historical
 HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 117

epidemics including leprosy, the plague, smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis (Mooij 2001). The
section on HIV/AIDS was based upon HIV-prevention materials from public health campaigns.
The curator, Herbert Mattie, juxtaposed posters and brochures from a range of groups,
showing how the values of each shaped very different approaches in the material they pro-
duced. While the posters of the GGD and of the AIDS fund (AIDSfonds) promoted safe sex
practices – which they defined as nonpenetrative because they did not advocate condom use
until 1987 – those issued by religious groups highlighted the messages “Stop AIDS – Stay
Faithful!” and “The safest precautions against AIDS are: Fidelity and Chastity.” Other objects
included a large paper “Collecting Condom” attached to a fishing rod, used for collecting
money for HIV/AIDS prevention during the annual Dutch Gay Pride parade of boats on
Amsterdam canals, and an angel costume with wings worn by an “Army of Love” volunteer
who distributed free condoms at gay bars (Mattie 2014).
Although these objects give a sense of the diversity of HIV/AIDS education activities in the
early years of the epidemic, they tell us little about the circumstances in which they were created
and used, or the response to these efforts among the target audience. Were some campaigns
more influential than others, or more popular, and were some unwelcome or resisted? This kind
of reflection, which could be achieved by recording recollections of the campaigns and sharing
them in the gallery as text or audio alongside specific posters, would provide a critical perspective
on the assumptions embedded in these materials and their intended and unintended effects. Such
engagement with these sources is particularly important given the known limitations of public
health messaging to promote sustained behavior change. Indeed, there is disagreement among
the designers of health communication programs regarding the efficacy of specific tactics, such as
fear or humor, as well as an acknowledged gap between target audiences having the relevant
information and being in a position to use it, for example, to negotiate safe sex with a partner
(Parry 2013, 135–137).
Exploring the reception of health education materials could be useful, moreover, to
consider the differences between Amsterdam and other cities, or between cities and rural
locations. Given the growing interest among scholars in understanding HIV/AIDS beyond
urban centers, it would be worth examining in more depth whether local archives store
only nationally produced related material and/or local variations. Historians could also
interview residents to assess the impact of HIV/AIDS and related health education cam-
paigns in smaller towns. Attention to these differences would complicate the notion of a
universal Dutch “tolerance” for homosexuality by including places where gay visibility was
more limited and homosexuality more likely to be stigmatized.
In the GGD exhibition, label text noted that Dutch HIV/AIDS policy was specifically
aimed at preventing stigmatization, of gay men in particular, but objects that were excluded
suggest that goal remained elusive even at the time of the exhibition. Certain educational
posters made specifically for gay men were not on display, for example, as the curator con-
sidered them too explicit and thus unsuitable for an intended audience including young
people as well as adults. This draws attention, again, to the limits of Dutch tolerance for
homosexuality. As sexual transmission is a key route of HIV infection, it seems pertinent to
include this information in an exhibition on the topic – and the question remains whether
explicit depictions of heterosexual sex would have been seen as equally problematic.
Visitors to the exhibition walked through five centuries of epidemics in Amsterdam before
arriving at the section on HIV/AIDS, linking this modern “plague” with others in the past.
The greatest strength of this strategy, in the curator’s view, was its illustration of shifts in
118 Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

some ideas about the spread of disease and those affected, while others persist, from the view
of leprosy as the untreatable wrath of God, to the stigma of cholera as the result of an
“immoral way of life,” rather than the terrible living conditions of the poor (Mattie 2014).
Such moral framings were a recognizable part of the “epidemic of signification” that
accompanied the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the late twentieth century, and this theme
is an important and commonly used strategy to highlight the interactions between the
social and the biological understandings of disease (Treichler 1987, 31–70). However,
like other exhibitions that focus primarily on parallels and progress in medical history,
this exhibition conveyed little about the experiences and views of the people who died
or the recollections of those who became infected but survived.
Such silences are even more pronounced in medical museums, however, where collections
focus almost entirely on medical perspectives despite the growing importance of patient per-
spectives in academic scholarship on the history of medicine. For example, HIV/AIDS objects
are absent from the collection of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, the Dutch national museum of
the history of science and medicine. Bart Grob, the museum’s curator of modern medicine, has
noted that the epidemic should be represented, yet he has struggled to identify “suitable”
objects to fit the museum’s collecting focus on scientific innovation. Together with one of the
authors of this chapter (Schalkwijk), Grob hosted a “witness seminar,” based on the model of
the Wellcome Trust’s History of the Biomedicine Research Group (T. Tansey 2018). Witness
seminars are generally used to gather oral histories from multiple perspectives on recent events
in biomedicine, but in this instance, the organizers intended to generate ideas for further
research into potential collection objects.
Ideally, (ex)patients, healthcare professionals, and scientific researchers would be equally
represented in such seminars, although they have usually been dominated by doctors and
scientists, often with patients or advocacy groups excluded.12 This is particularly problematic
in the case of HIV/AIDS, given the crucial role of activists and people with AIDS (PWAs) in
transforming scientific research practices, participating in drug trials, and challenging phar-
maceutical profiteering. The cultural traces of HIV/AIDS also document the distorted
representation of HIV-positive people in the history of the epidemic, as they are often
depicted as villains and sinners or innocent victims. As historian of medicine Richard McKay
has argued, for example, the misleading characterization of Gaëtan Dugas (who became
known worldwide as “patient zero”), as willfully infecting hundreds of men, has played a
significant role in the criminalization of people with HIV (McKay 2014, 187–191). Incor-
porating patient perspectives is thus an especially important corrective to this pervasive trend
within the historical record as well as the interpretations based upon it.
At the witness seminar at the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, patients were represented by a
former volunteer in the AIDS Buddy program and a long-term AIDS survivor. Three phy-
sicians and two nurses who had worked with people with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s also
participated. All were asked to bring along an object that reminded them of a key experience
during the epidemic, an assignment intended to spark recollections and discussion, rather
than to lead directly to museum acquisitions. Organizers also asked the group to think of
objects they considered suitable for an exhibition on the history of the epidemic in the
Netherlands, even if they did not know where they might locate them.
During the witness seminar, Grob evidently aimed to find objects and stories related to the
scientific research on HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, repeatedly asking for technical and
biomedical innovations. Some of the participants, especially the doctors, had worked in close
 HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 119

connection with researchers, primarily to develop new knowledge and potential treatments.
They stated that HIV/AIDS was not battled with new scientific instruments and that before
the availability of highly effective antiretroviral therapy (in 1996), doctors treated opportunistic
infections with already existing medications and medical equipment.13
Participants did suggest several potential objects, including the port (poortkatheter), first used for
oncology patients in 1981, which allowed people to be treated at home rather than in hospital.
They also proposed samples of the first antiretroviral drugs. One participant noted that it was
common to prescribe thirty pills a day per patient, on a strict regime, causing practical challenges
as well as psychological strain. Another remarked that although these drugs saved his life, they
had also destroyed his body. Among the group overall, the cooperation between Dutch health-
care workers, their patients, and AIDS advocacy groups was considered the most remarkable
“innovation.” Participants mentioned specific events, such as informal meetings held every two
months in the Mozes en Aäron (Moses and Aaron) church in Amsterdam, where physicians,
nurses, and patients exchanged the latest information on HIV/AIDS.
After the seminar, Grob concluded that the objects discussed did not fit in the museum’s
collection with its focus on innovation and equipment. Yet, as the participants stressed several
times, the development of scientific knowledge was remarkably rapid and the transformation
of practices of research, healthcare, and drug testing which facilitated such breakthroughs
continues to shape medicine today. The question of how to capture this in the form of his-
torical objects remains a challenge to the collecting policy of the museum. Although HIV/
AIDS was not included in new exhibitions after a major renovation in December 2017, we
continue to discuss future options with museum staff.
The situation is not much better in museums with a wider collecting mandate than the
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, such as the Amsterdam Museum. Staff there have accessioned
and exhibited some relevant material, primarily through the efforts of curator Annemarie
de Wildt. In honor of World AIDS Day in December 2013, the museum announced the
acquisition of the dresses of famous Dutch drag queen Hellun Zelluf (legal name Geert
Vissers), who played an important part in HIV/AIDS education and awareness in the
Dutch gay scene before dying of AIDS in 1992. A blog post on the museum’s website
focused on the way she combined entertainment and education in her TV series The Gay
Dating Show (Amsterdam Museum 2013).
The museum has also been involved in acquiring the Dutch AIDS Memorial Quilt for its
own collection as well as the collections of other Dutch museums. Gart Zeebregts, who had
been a volunteer at the NAMES Foundation in San Francisco, introduced the idea of the
AIDS Memorial Quilt to the Dutch gay scene in the Gay Krant (Gay Newspaper) in 1988
(NAMENproject Nederland 2018b). The quilt never grew as large as the US version, partly
due to the lower death toll in the Netherlands but also because of the lack of activism.
Without the urgent need to represent the scale of the epidemic publicly, few people took the
opportunity to memorialize loved ones by creating quilt panels. The quilt was displayed on
World AIDS Day every year after 1988, but it was not until 1992, when large parts of the
US AIDS Memorial Quilt were displayed at the Beurs van Berlage building during the
International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, that quilting started to become more pop-
ular in the Netherlands. This led to the launch of the Dutch NAMENproject Stichting, a
foundation responsible for managing the production and addition of panels.
In 2012, the annual display of the AIDS Quilt on AIDS Memorial Day was organized for
the last time, by the Dutch organization for people living with HIV (HIV Vereniging Nederland
120 Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

or HVN), as the organization shifted its primary emphasis from memorialization to support,
emancipation, de-stigmatization, and advocacy for people living with HIV (HIV Vereniging
Nederland 2018). The NAMENproject Stichting offered the Amsterdam Museum all thirty
quilt blocks, but caring for the full set was deemed too expensive, and display was problematic
due to space limitations (Meijer-van Mensch and de Wildt 2014, 75–79).
De Wildt arranged to take two quilt blocks that had a strong Amsterdam character, and
together with the NAMENproject Stichting, she reached out to additional museums to accept
others. Several institutions declined, citing lack of artistic value or insufficient “Dutchness” as
the main factor in their decisions (Meijer-van Mensch and de Wildt 2014, 78). Such judgments
reflect the inflexibility of collection policies and their unsuitability for evaluating the cultural
significance of HIV/AIDS and quilts as folk art. They also reflect limited notions of the impact
of international exchange on the Netherlands – in terms of the pandemic itself, as well as its
representation in historical artifacts. The quilt was eventually distributed among several muse-
ums, including the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnhem, and it is also available online as all
sections have been digitized (NAMENproject Nederland 2018c).

Lost objects
The lack of attention to the material culture of HIV/AIDS has also led to the loss of materials
of historical significance. As part of a class project organized by one of the authors (Parry), in
which students reinterpreted museum objects to address queer histories or located items in
personal collections for potential inclusion in museums, one group identified a handbook
written by people caring for a friend dying of AIDS, produced in the 1980s. The typed
document was based on a handwritten record of daily interactions with their “patient,” Bert.
The printed version was distributed to other “buddies” as a guide to the everyday issues in
caring for someone with AIDS at this time. The original handwritten version has not yet
been found (Kuiper, de Ruijter, and Smits van Waesberghe 2015).
The loss of such an object reflects several issues. Although we might assume that collecting
the contemporary is significantly easier than locating historical objects from a distant past,
unless collecting is being actively undertaken, people may not realize that the materials they
are working with are historically significant and should be preserved. This is especially likely
among groups that are unaccustomed to seeing their heritage collected and exhibited, such as
LGBTQ+ communities, and during crisis situations, when resources are focused on present
challenges rather than the preservation of the past. Medical heritage is particularly vulnerable
in this regard, as material no longer used is often discarded as irrelevant when replaced by
other techniques or technologies. Objects relating to illness and death may be accidentally, or
even intentionally, destroyed to preserve the privacy of a patient or relative. Material
relating to a loved one might also be damaged or thrown away due to grief, or if saved,
kept privately as a means of remembrance.
These issues prompted our engagement with recreating lost heritage as a means to draw
attention to the problem, focusing on another artifact that is presumed destroyed – a scrap-
book that documented life and death on one of the earliest AIDS wards in the Netherlands,
at the OLVG hospital in the center of Amsterdam. Staff who worked on the ward in the late
1980s and early 1990s still speak passionately about their experiences. They emphasize the
youth of the patients, the seriousness of their illnesses, and the lovers and friends who visited,
all of which created an unusual atmosphere. Various policies were changed in response to the
 HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 121

surge of young men facing terminal illnesses admitted to the ward, and the shift in hospital
culture has had a lasting effect. The staff kept a scrapbook during this period, filled with
memorabilia including letters, updates on ward issues, and photographs. This historically
significant artifact would have provided a unique representation of this intense time, and
from a range of perspectives – including the experiences of people with AIDS, their families,
partners, and friends; healthcare workers; and LGBTQ+ people and allies.
We have recreated a digital version of the scrapbook – not as a faithful reproduction or
facsimile of the original, but as a hybrid and experimental source for historical research and
interpretation. Taking some artistic license allowed us to weave together sources from dif-
ferent collections as well as individuals’ private holdings, which was especially useful given
that the collection policies of medical museums and archives are often limited strictly to the
perspectives of health practitioners – not their patients, other caregivers, or advocates. In
contrast, the pilot version of the scrapbook incorporates personal photographs and ephemera,
archival documents and photographs, together with the personal reflections of Eric Windhorst,
who has been living with HIV since 1987.
The digital scrapbook enables us to use assets that are often unsuitable for a gallery exhi-
bition, such as newspaper clippings, as well as digitized material that may be of poor quality
for physical reproduction but which renders well online. Together with graduates of the MA
in Public History program at the University of Amsterdam, we also filmed interviews with
people recalling their experiences with HIV in the Dutch epidemic. Selected clips from these
interviews are included in a film we created, Voices of the Epidemic, which was shown at the
Amsterdam Museum and the International AIDS Conference in July 2018, as part of a fes-
tival funded by Amsterdam City Council. We will develop an online documentary website
with additional materials, which will be expanded to include underrepresented groups who
have shown interest in the project, including deaf LGBTQ+ people and people with
hemophilia and HIV.14 We also hosted a workshop of museum professionals and AIDS
advocacy groups from the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, to discuss the
underrepresentation of AIDS objects in museum collections. Our goal is to use these projects
to stimulate the creation and collection of new material for the archive(s), to collect reflections
on moments already captured in existing collections, and to locate artifacts and objects that
remain undiscovered in the private holdings of individuals.

Conclusion: The future of the history of HIV/AIDS

While we focus here on the specific circumstances in the Netherlands that undermine the col-
lection and exhibitions of the history of HIV/AIDS, there are signs of equivalent problems
emerging elsewhere. Previously celebrated as the largest folk art project in the world, even the
US NAMES Project quilt is now considered at risk, due to a “widening generational disconnect
and the increasing fragility of the textile artefact itself ” (Literat and Balsamo 2014, 138). Citing
such preservation concerns, museums in the Netherlands have followed those in the USA,
Australia, and New Zealand, granting only limited access to communities desiring to use quilt
panels for memorial and educational events (Meijer-van Mensch and de Wildt 2014, 72–74).
Ironically, the transformation of the quilt into a heritage object thus contributes to the forgetting
of history – it is stored away until World AIDS Day and then exhibited as a memorial of the past.
Yet the pandemic continues, and there remain gaps in our knowledge as well as emerging
challenges. The human rights issues that drive the pandemic are unresolved, with rising rates
122 Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk

of inequality making some people both especially vulnerable to infection and unable to
access affordable health care. At the same time as we need to learn more about the
health issues that accompany aging with HIV, for example, we are already forgetting the
lessons of the past, as AIDS is stigmatized and criminalized by countries introducing
penalties for spreading infection. In the Netherlands, 40 percent of people with HIV
were not born there, and public health researchers report that stigma within immigrant
communities is deterring testing and treatment. Half of this group goes to the doctor
only after developing potentially life-threatening conditions (SOAAIDS Nederland 2018).
A rise in infections has also been detected among men who have sex with men; they
now make up two-thirds of all new cases (aidsfonds 2018b). More than one hundred
people are dying of AIDS annually, with additional deaths caused by long-term use of
medications by people who are HIV positive to manage their viral load. The pandemic is
part of history, but it is not yet past.
We cannot rely on the current stock of objects in collections to represent the past of the
pandemic adequately, document its present circumstances, and intervene in its future impact.
Dutch museums are not equipped to address the forgetfulness or to tell a diverse narrative of
the earlier phases of the pandemic. Nor are they collecting the shifting traces of this history as
it moves across different groups in society, limiting the resources related to current events
that could be used in future exhibitions. Our hope is that the activities discussed here, with
the catalyst of the 2018 International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, will become a starting
point for a wider acknowledgement of the urgent need to broaden and deepen the collection
of the material culture of HIV/AIDS, in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Notes
1 Exhibitions include Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 (curated by Helen Molesworth
and Claire Grace, 2010, at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums);
Art AIDS America (curated by Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka, 2015, at the Tacoma Art
Museum); and AIDS – Based on a True Story (curated by Vladimir Čajkovac, 2015, at the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden). Recent scholarship includes the collection of essays “Forum:
Remembering AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 1987–2012 and Beyond” (Morris
2012) and David France’s How to Survive a Plague (2016).
2 Chapter 17 in this book describes the National Museum of Ireland’s efforts to collect contemporary
protest materials; however, it focuses primarily on the campaign to legalize abortion.
3 The annual meeting was previously held in Amsterdam in 1992, having been relocated from the United
States due to restrictions preventing people with HIV from entering the country (Adolf 1992).
4 A presentation by Matt Cook at the LGBTQ+ heritage conference of Archives, Libraries, Muse-
ums, and Special Collections in London, June 2016, clarified this issue for the authors. See also
Cook’s article “‘Archives of Feeling’: The AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987” (2017, 51–78).
5 IHLIA (Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch Informatiecentrum en Archief) uses the acronym LGBT on their
website and in publications after research among their target user groups revealed “people can find
it offensive to be included in the plus” (van den Hoonaard 2017).
6 Steven Seidman questioned the predominant characterization of Amsterdam as a gay utopia (1994,
69–71). In his overview of homosexuality, published after the legalization of gay marriage, Gert
Hekma (2004) argued that emancipation was still an unfinished project. The limits were under-
scored as this book went to press, when a translation of the “Nashville Declaration” condemning
homosexuality was endorsed by 250 Dutch signatories, including Protestant ministers, university
faculty, and political representatives (Pieters 2019).
7 For a deeper discussion of this context, see Parry and van Houten (2018, 532–559).
8 Although most of the activities are located in Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven also
plays a leading role in Dutch queer projects and has organized exhibitions, engagement activities,
 HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands 123

and a reading group. The museum published a glossary of terminology for cultural professionals,
compiled by sociologist Alice Venir (2015). These are also described in the introduction and
chapter 23 of this book.
9 Hofman’s article was one of several mistakenly to identify the Amsterdam monument as the first in
Europe. There are several predecessors, notably in Germany (NAMENproject Nederland 2018a).
10 Stedelijk curator Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen organized a poster exhibition of the work of Félix
González-Torres and screened Derek Jarman’s film Blue as part of Commitment, an “activist exhibition
series” addressing AIDS in the early 1990s. The museum has also hosted exhibitions of particular
artists’ work that relates to AIDS, including Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz (see biography of
Nieuwenhuyzen at Stedelijk Museum 2016). Huis Marseille (2007) has also mounted an exhibition of
photographs by David Goldblatt, which included a couple of images related to AIDS.
11 These usually focus on contemporary challenges, such as poverty; lack of access to healthcare or medi-
cation; or ongoing stigma. Alternatively, they challenge assumptions about who is at risk and what it is
like to live with HIV (see, for example, ANP 2015; Kok 2018; Smits and Kokkelkoren 2001).
12 There are exceptions, such as an early witness seminar in which representatives of an advocacy
group for people with hemophilia were invited, although discussion centered on scientific research
(E.M. Tansey and Christie 1999).
13 Antiretroviral drugs were used from 1987, beginning with AZT, but these were far less effective
than combination therapies using newly developed antiretrovirals introduced in 1996.
14 Voices of the Epidemic is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLpaIQ4mazQ.
The film includes clips from a project by the Florence Nightingale Institute, Pioneers in AIDS
Nursing, online at https://www.fni.nl/pioniers-in-aidsverpleging. Schalkwijk is also involved in a
project to conduct oral histories with injection drug users, including those with HIV/AIDS, led by
Dutch historian Gemma Blok (2017, 104–125).

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PART III
Bodies in the Museum?
Joshua G. Adair

Much of the meaning in museums is hidden; going in search of the cause for this concealment
reveals a few recurrent strategies/justifications at work. One source notes that in London alone,
“Many museums in the capital keep more than 90% of their collections stored away”
(“London Museums” 2011). One common reason is that most museums lack the physical
space to exhibit all the items in their holdings simultaneously. Another is that some items are
too physically vulnerable to expose to environmental conditions in galleries. In and of them-
selves, these explanations are fairly banal, if straightforward and understandable.
Another explanation that tends to go unstated – which authors throughout this collection
highlight – is that materials which are considered sensitive thematically or that are not easily
categorized in terms of gender and sexuality are purposely hidden. As the authors in the section
will explain, this sometimes happens because museum staffs have not been trained to identify
and engage with some varieties of difference; in other cases, they may be daunted by ambiguity
and the inability to classify such items within conventional categories or paradigms. Curators
may overlook opportunities to illustrate the relationship of bodies to museums when they rely
on traditional exhibition modes that dictate specific groupings and arrangements. Finally – and
perhaps most frequently – such occlusions are part of a conscious strategy to avoid potential
conflict with visitors, museum boards, stakeholders, and even other institution employees.
Ambiguity and controversy have long terrorized the institution of the museum, which has
held “Enlightenment” values of categorization and classification – and rules founded in rigidity
and reductiveness – close to its heart. For individuals and groups who traditionally have been
disenfranchised by such spaces – or treated as historical or scientific specimens therein – museums
most frequently misrepresent, misinterpret, or misremember. Many visitors find only fragments
of themselves and their experiences in these spaces, or they encounter versions of their so-called
selves so disembodied, mischaracterized, or maligned that they flee without resisting.
James Luna (1950–2018), the Puyukitchum/Ipai/Mexican-American performance artist
who problematized museum narratives and displays observed:

It doesn’t really matter what I am. I know what I am. See, that’s the point. I’ll be in a
plane. And someone’s sitting next to me. And they’re looking at me. And they’re
128 Joshua G. Adair

wondering what this guy is. And they’ll ask me: “Excuse me sir, are you Native Amer-
ican, are you Indian, or Hawaiian?” I get that a lot too. One of the most troubling
questions that I hear is, “Are you full blood?” For me, an Indian is foremost somebody
who is culturally Native. They know their tribe, their cultural background and their
“Indian ways,” as we would say amongst ourselves.
(Righthand 2011)

For Luna, whose “Take a picture with a real Indian” performance insisted that viewers inter-
rogate their own assumptions about identity, authenticity, and ownership, we must question the
right of museums to make pronouncements in those regards. His work pushed boundaries and, as
a result, made people – individually and as representatives of institutions – uncomfortable and
uncertain. For many, it is difficult to ask “is that a real ________?” only to find that the question
itself is the problem – a symptom of a system of thinking that must be revised completely.
When we participate in this problematic framework, Luna insists, we engage in “dual humi-
liation” (Righthand 2011). He refers to his own choice to perform the culturally prescribed role
of “the real Indian” and the audience participation that predicates this situation. In other words,
in giving in to assumptions and stereotypes, all parties are part of an ongoing problem. In his case,
obviously, the participation is only partial and purposeful – he plays along in order to illustrate
the deeply problematic nature of forcefully, even violently, attributing identity to others.
The authors in this section – which is subdivided into two parts that examine indigeneity and
ambiguity, respectively – raise these questions, alongside other important issues. Ann Cvetkovich
initiates this discussion by focusing upon Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice, which envisions
the radical potential of queer decolonial museum practice. By overtly inserting himself into
museum narratives, Monkman opens up new spaces and possibilities – often employing the
erotic to achieve such ends. He transforms traditional museum display forms like dioramas and
vitrines into transgressive exhibits that destabilize traditional narratives of Indigenous peoples.
Camille Georgeson-Usher continues this examination of the intersections of indigeneity and
gender in the museum with a sobering observation: “history has not been kind to Indigenous
women. Like a fungus, colonialism attacks the roots of their sovereignty and leadership” (2018). To
redress these wrongs, Georgeson-Usher eschews the constraining conventions of traditional scho-
larship and opts instead for an experimental mode. The resulting expressiveness better suits
exploring the concepts of unbodying and rebodying, which form the foundation of her essay advo-
cating for decolonial practice, territorial reclamation, and enhanced female autonomy. She illus-
trates the ways in which artistic works that reconnect Indigenous bodies to the land reveal the
damage that has been done, even as they reclaim the power of First Peoples.
Decolonial museum practices also comprise the heart of Natasha Bissonauth’s examination
of Chitra Ganesh’s art and its power to augment – rather than falsely downplay – gender
ambiguity in exhibitions. Building on Muñoz’s concept of co-presence (2009), Bissonauth leads
readers into a deeper understanding of Ganesh’s interventions in established museum spaces
and Asian iconography. Specifically, Ganesh disrupts narratives already in progress with pro-
vocative displays, animations, and temporary murals. She even sets her work in dialogue with
what is perhaps the most prominent example of feminist art – Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.
The resulting visual interjections complicate – and occasionally negate – extant narratives by
focusing upon the productive potential of feminine agency and autonomy. In the creation of
these dialogues, ambiguity takes on power, refusing foreclosure by the definitive declarations
that so often characterized prior museum practice.
 Bodies in the museum? 129

Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur’s collaborative chapter closes this section with an
exploration of two museum photographs depicting the same sculpture: a Roman copy of a
Greek fourth-century BCE bust of Dionysus, housed at the Capitoline Museums in Rome.
The authors use these photographs as an entrée to examine the personal, political, and phi-
losophical problematics of representing nonbinary trans identities in museums. By embracing
complexity and paradox, they present generative modes of critical thought in which
instability and/or indeterminacy may not signal absence or a need for erasure.
Ultimately, this cluster of chapters offers innovative, energizing insights about opportu-
nities to break binary thinking and embrace a complex plurality at odds with the purportedly
straightforward narratives of the past. Whether focused upon indigeneity, gender, or other
aspects of bodily identity that have been regulated, misrepresented, or ignored by museums
for centuries, these authors emphasize the fact that bodies do matter in the museum.

References
BBC News. 2011. “London Museums Urged to Show More ‘Hidden’ Artefacts.” https://www.bbc.
com/news/uk-england-london-12214145.
Georgeson-Usher, Camille. 2018. Personal communication with Joshua Adair and Amy Levin.
November 5.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New
York University Press.
Righthand, Jess. 2011. “Q & A: James Luna.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.
com/arts-culture/q-and-a-james-luna-74252076/.
A. Indigenous Bodies
11
KENT MONKMAN’S SHAME AND PREJUDICE
Artist Curation as Queer Decolonial Museum Practice

Ann Cvetkovich

Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, an exhibition prompted by Canada
150 sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017, offers a remarkable example of a queer and decolonial
museum practice that represents and critiques national history, including the category of the
nation itself, from an Indigenous perspective. Invited to create an exhibition as part of Canada
150’s many cultural initiatives, Monkman started from the premise that Indigenous people have
very little to celebrate, given a 150-year history of genocide, incarceration, poverty, and illness.
Although keenly aware of the museum’s role as a colonial institution, he sought to provide his
own version of a survey that would cover a range of Indigenous histories pre-contact to the
present that would include not just colonial settlement, the Indian residential school system, and
other forms of violence, but also resilience and survival in the face of ongoing struggles. Central
to Monkman’s strategy is his dual role as artist and curator and the juxtaposition of his own art-
work in a variety of media, including the large-format landscape and history painting for which
he has become well-known, with visual art, texts, and artifacts drawn largely from the host
institutions for the project.1 Across the exhibition, Monkman makes strategic use of conventional
forms of museum display such as the diorama and the vitrine, together with material artifacts such
as pages from print books, legal contracts, china, silverware, and cradleboards, transforming their
contaminated histories through his own creative practice.
Having engaged with genres such as landscape and history in his painting practice, and
having produced museum exhibitions that involved curating his own work alongside
museum collections or using them as inspiration, Monkman was well situated to imagine a
museum exhibition that does cultural justice to Indigenous history as an important counter-
part to legal justice and economic and material restoration.2 Alert to how genres of museum
display such as the diorama and the vitrine have often rendered Indigenous people as dead
and disappeared, as savages and exotic curiosities, or as resources to be extracted, he grapples
with the potentially inherent clash between the museum and Indigenous cultures, while
holding onto museums and archives as sites of knowledge and cultural transformation. He
builds from a painting practice that has been in dialogue with the classical canon, referencing
painters from Caravaggio to Picasso, not only to interrogate the representational violence of
Indigenous erasure, but also to imagine an Indigenous presence by inserting it within existing
134 Ann Cvetkovich

genres. In Shame and Prejudice, for example, he explores the coincidence of modernism and
indigeneity and how the flattening of space in modernist paintings accompanies the shrinking
of space for Indigenous peoples.
Monkman’s capacity to transform the museum from within using its own conventions
and by combining artistic and curatorial practice also benefits from his playful perfor-
mance of gender and sexuality. In addition to using his own artwork, he adds into the
mix his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and imagines the exhibition as a set of
chapters in her memoir.3 She appears as a time traveler throughout the exhibition, a
two-spirit high-femme angel of history, who injects humor and camp aesthetics where
there is much sadness. This queer indigeneity is central to Monkman’s process, liberating
him to move across genres, time, and affective registers to create a new kind of museum.
In the “tour” of selected sites or “chapters” that follows, I explore how Monkman
enhances his project of queering decolonial practice by making it openly erotic.4 Putting
himself in the picture as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, presenting her memoir as history,
and mixing his own work with archival materials enables new forms and conceptions of
museum display.

Scent of a Beaver and the diorama

One of the important genres of museum display that Monkman takes up and transforms through
queer performance is the diorama. Shame and Prejudice opens with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s
lavish eighteenth-century painting The Swing (1767) brought to three-dimensional life in an
installation called Scent of a Beaver (2016), comprised of mannequins of the British and French
leaders, Wolfe and Montcalm, posed in admiration of a sumptuously dressed woman on a swing.
Closer inspection reveals that all three resemble not only each other, but Monkman himself – in
the guise of the shapeshifting, gender-bending Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Crossing not only
gender identities, by playing both men and women, but racial and national ones, by playing
British and French colonizers as well as the Indigenous woman between them, Monkman moves
between binaries and power differences rather than pitting them against one another.
As a person of mixed Cree and Irish ancestry, Monkman “passes” in a variety of
ways, but it is nonetheless startling to see a blue-eyed version of him in the white wigs
worn by Wolfe and Montcalm. At the same time, his flexibility in crossing genders
makes it possible to adopt and comment upon eighteenth-century European masculi-
nities with a playful spirit, especially since the elaborate hair and richly decorated cos-
tumes are such apt material for gendered spectacle. Drawing on traditions of queer drag
and Indigenous two-spirit culture, Monkman embraces Wolfe and Montcalm as per-
formative roles and sets the tone for the exhibition’s presumption that the colonial
legacy, including its national museums and art galleries, can be taken up for indigenizing
and decolonial purposes.
Even more flamboyant than his white male personae is Monkman (or Miss Chief
Eagle Testickle) as the woman (or femme-presenting person) on the swing, who, retaining
Monkman’s dark eyes and hair, is an indigenized version of her French counterpart in
the original painting. She wears an embroidered, fur-lined animal-skin coat, trimmed
with beaver pelts, as well as elaborately decorated moccasins. In appropriating the paint-
ing, Monkman reminds the viewer that the material excess of the French ancien régime,
often on display by turning women into decorative icons, is the product of colonial
 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice 135

wealth, including the fur trade in New France. As the punning title also indicates,
Monkman embraces the sexual connotations of the beaver (which derive from the use of
the animal pelts from colonial trade for prostitutes’ merkins). The often-invisible Indi-
genous presence in European fashion and décor is foregrounded and revealed to be every
bit as over the top as the frothy pink dress and elaborate bonnet worn by Fragonard’s
Rococo original.
Rather than being banished as the site of exotic othering or colonial ethnography, the
diorama becomes the scene of gendered performance and theatricality. The erotic trian-
gulation of Montcalm and Wolfe with a cross-dressing (wo)man between them uses the
power of queer sexual perversity to destabilize gendered colonial relations. Monkman
unapologetically makes him/herself, rather than the founding fathers, the center of this
historical narrative. In the exhibition brochure (2017), written as chapters from the
memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, she declares that “No one got rich and powerful
without us on their side.” Moreover, she emphasizes her erotic power: “I had them both
wrapped around my elegant pinkies in those days, Montcalm and Wolfe. They fell over
themselves to curry my favour.” Monkman’s movement across genders, races, and nations is
also bolstered by his shapeshifting moves across media. By transforming Fragonard’s two-
dimensional painting into a three-dimensional diorama installation, Monkman signals his
capacity to indigenize colonial cultural production. Rather than totally rejecting the diorama
due to its history of erasing and misrepresenting Indigenous peoples, he instead uses it as a site
of performative and aesthetic multiplicity and draws on its material spectacle for the magic of
the painting brought to life.

Starvation Table and the vitrine

Monkman’s commitment to creating dense relations between what is on the walls and what
is in the space, and to blurring distinctions between the art gallery and the museum, informs
the other opening sections of the exhibit. Those sections focus on pre-Confederation his-
tories and the fur trade in New France through imagery of the beaver and the bison as figures
for Indigenous vitality and extermination. He continues to take aim at conventional genres of
material display in the exhibition section (or chapter) called “Starvation” which features
Starvation Table (2017), a vitrine in the form of a long dinner table.5 His curatorial strategy of
combining his own creations and archival artifacts, or images and objects, comes into play as
he places the table in dialogue with a wall display. The display includes historical drawings,
prints, and book pages about the bison, as well as the large-format Iron Horse (2015),
Monkman’s version of a history painting about the building of the railroad. Here, on a lavish
table set with china, silverware, wine glasses, and ornate candelabra, is laid out an intricate
lace runner along with an abundance of grapes, hors d’oeuvres, and other food. The china
plates commemorate the iconic scene of the death of General Wolfe, one of the “fathers” of
Confederation; in other words, they are imprinted with the genre of historical painting that
Monkman seeks to revise. In this way, Monkman takes the typical museum display, which
often privileges wealth through European material culture such as china and silver – also the
subject of chapter 6 in this collection – and shows the underbelly of violence and theft on
which it is based. Toward the end of the table, the plates grow emptier and what looks like
blood spills from an overturned glass of wine. The lace table runner extends outside the
vitrine, but its end is frayed, and the five plates on it are strewn with the tiny bones of wild
136 Ann Cvetkovich

animals. Unlike the historic plates under the glass that were culled from the collections of
Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of History and Montreal’s McCord Museum, these “starvation
plates” were manufactured by Monkman. They are imprinted with archival photographs from
Calgary’s Glenbow Museum that depict bison hunts as well as bones, harvested to produce the
bone china in the vitrine, piled in a combination of trophy display and killing field.
By placing these images of colonial extraction onto plates that resemble the historical ones,
Monkman defamiliarizes the colonial presence in material artifacts such as plates and silverware,
goods that are usually displayed as luxuries, and reveals the violence that pervades both ceremonial
and everyday material culture.6 Like the transformation of Fragonard’s painting into a diorama, the
shapeshifting move from image to material object brings beauty and destruction together.
Monkman uses scale to great effect to achieve these juxtapositions. The installation’s large
paintings, grand table, and life-size sculpture make for an impressive aesthetic and material spec-
tacle, but as the viewer moves in closer, other levels of information transform what appears on
the surface. The intricate blue and white patterns that are common in china tableware, for
example, insert colonial imagery into everyday life. The rims of plates depicting historical battle
scenes are decorated with bows and arrows, and Yousuf Karsh’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth at
her 1953 coronation becomes a sign of British rule rather than a moment of celebration. The
brightly colored hors d’oeuvres made with salmon, caviar, and sea roe are also a reminder of the
colonial exoticism and exploitation that brings natural resources to the table.
The vitrine that exemplifies the contradictions of bounty and deprivation, excess and era-
sure, amplifies the two-dimensional images on the walls, which also embrace contradiction in

FIGURE 11.1Installation view of Scent of a Beaver in Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. Art
Museum at the University of Toronto, 2017. Curated by Kent Monkman
Source: Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid. Image courtesy of Kent Monkman.
 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice 137

the pairing of Monkman’s work with historical artifacts. Colonialist culture’s fascination with
the bison is evident in a series of historical images that Monkman chose for this display,
which include Albert Bierstadt’s study for a larger painting, prints by George Catlin, and
pages taken from books about natural history and exploration that translate the wonders of
the Americas for European audiences. As with his response to the diorama and the vitrine,
Monkman approaches this kind of artifact with curiosity and an openness to aesthetic effects.
In writings and lectures on the exhibition, he talks about his admiration for the work of
Catlin and Paul Kane, who used the aesthetic power of their craft to present the beauty of
Indigenous life despite their colonialist attitudes. Monkman notes that images from this
period can have the surreal quality of fantasy because the artists often were not familiar with
their subjects (which also distinguishes artists like Catlin and Kane, who worked from direct
observation). The billowy fur of the bison in Of Useful Knowledge makes a beautiful image
even if it is not scientifically accurate and the book’s ethnographic account reinforces colonial
epistemologies. His placement of pages from books on the walls – and presentation of them
as both work of art and colonial artifact – blurs the boundaries between art gallery and
museum to create an alternative and decolonial history. This capacity to appreciate the aes-
thetic power in the archival remains of colonial genocide owes much to Monkman’s attu-
nement to representations of land and animals so important to Indigenous ways of life. But
the taste for excess and decoration evident in his curatorial choices is also that of the gay
aesthete whose tastes range from fine tableware to antiquarian books, all of which carry an
Indigenous presence.
Paired with these archival images and artifacts is Iron Horse, Monkman’s own painting in
the style of the elaborate landscapes for which he is known. Against a backdrop of craggy
mountains and a lake in the valley below, the coming of the railroad that enabled settler
colonial expansion on Indigenous lands is represented in the ominous form of a Trojan horse,
the industrial animal that will displace the bison. It is being pushed and pulled by a group of
scantily clad and queeny Indigenous men whose unapologetically sexy display of their
laboring bodies refuses subjugation. Naked but for high heels and a billowing red chiffon
scarf, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle stands witness to their beauty and to the desecration of the
land, and remains not only resilient, but extravagantly so, across history. Her presence as a
queer fairy guardian adds another layer of meaning to the ensemble of images and artifacts
providing an alternative to stories of both colonial triumph and Indigenous destruction and
underscoring the power of art and craft to imagine history differently. The interplay between
visual material on the walls and material artifacts is central to this strategy. Miss Chief’s spirit
of flamboyant display pervades Monkman’s curatorial sensibility and his queer and femme
appreciation for the aesthetics of material artifacts and luxury goods.

The Daddies and history paintings

At the heart of Shame and Prejudice’s critique and reworking of Canada 150 celebrations is
Monkman’s intervention into the representation of Canadian history via the iconic painting,
Fathers of Confederation, by Robert Harris.7 Commissioned in 1883, the painting com-
memorates an 1864 meeting in Charlottetown to plan the unification of provinces and ter-
ritories that in 1867 would form the nation of Canada. The original, which hung in the
Parliament Buildings in the national capital of Ottawa, was destroyed by fire in 1916, but a
copy remains there.8 In The Daddies (2016), Monkman reworks the famous painting to
138 Ann Cvetkovich

FIGURE 11.2Installation view of Starvation Table in Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. Art
Museum at the University of Toronto, 2017. Curated by Kent Monkman
Source: Image courtesy of Sadie MacDonald.

include Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who pops up on what was an inconspicuous bench
covered in a blanket in the original. In Monkman’s version, Miss Chief sits naked on a
Hudson’s Bay blanket with her back to the viewer. Her legs are spread wide open in flagrant
display for the male politicians, whose circumspect and somber gazes suddenly read very
differently. Asserting an unabashedly sexualized Indigenous presence, Monkman transforms
this historic moment into a scene of homoerotic encounter. He also reverses the sexualized
dynamics of colonialism as rape or assault because Miss Chief is able to use her sexuality, and
her gender variability, as a form of power, making herself (and her genitals) the centerpiece
of a painting supposedly about the nation’s creation by men of European descent.
The revised history painting acquires additional force with its placement alongside original
documents, such as studies for the original painting and portraits of Wilfrid Laurier, John A.
Macdonald, and the Parliament Buildings. A Hudson’s Bay blanket sits on the bench in front of
the wall display; still widely marketed by the national department store, its familiar colored stripes
have been read as a powerful symbol of colonialism.9 Further amplifying the gay and queer
sexual content, Monkman adds his own painting, Bears of Confederation (2016), in which elderly
white men in leather frolic with bears who are topping them.10 Turning the history painting (as a
mechanism for nation building) against itself through blatant sexualization, Monkman shows
 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice 139

viewers how such images are used to underwrite the violence of nation formation and to
empower a culture that polices open sexual expression.
Monkman’s queer sensibility and shameless eroticism add to the transgressive power of his
curatorial and exhibition practice. His willingness to put himself in the picture is one of those
transgressions, including his performance of whiteness and both masculine and feminine
genders. For example, turning to the domestic side of political life in A Country Wife (2016),
Monkman invents a portrait of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, with his
“country wife,” the term used to refer to the Indigenous women whom white settler fur
traders took as sexual and common-law partners; by this means, Métis culture was produced.
Monkman himself (and/or Miss Chief) plays the Indigenous woman, dressed in the style of a
white woman of privilege, and he shows her crying. The tears on her cheek made visible by
her runny mascara could be the result of being trapped in a relationship with a drunk and
philandering man. Through her sadness, Monkman also exposes marriage and hetero-
normativity as foundations for colonial institutions as well as the duplicity of men whose
intimate relations were as corrupt as their political ones. He has long explored the relation
between sexual intimacy and colonial power, for example, in images of sex between white
and Indigenous men. By inhabiting the position of a woman with compassion, he is able to
display the affective sadness of colonialism that is not only hers but his. There is also the
touch of the two-spirit trickster here insofar as Macdonald has taken as his wife someone
who is not the woman he thinks her to be and who may well be using him for her own
purposes. Monkman’s performances of racial crossing and gender crossing and his multiple
embodiments of femininity (especially as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle) thus articulate the per-
verse sexual politics of colonialism, which are rarely explored in more conventional histories.

The Scream and the cradleboards

The multiple affective registers made available by Monkman’s curatorial strategy – sadness and
grief but also humor and aesthetic pleasure – are especially important for his approach to the
trauma of the Indian residential school and its afterlives. He grapples with the genocide of
Indigenous persons in ways that highlight ongoing practices of violence, including forms of
archival absence and erasure. Often such violence and the affects it produces cannot be
contained within conventional museum practice, or they run the risk of being domes-
ticated and contained by it. The unruliness of desire is crucial to Shame and Prejudice’s
mission, expressed through Miss Chief’s presence and her multiple embodiments of
high-femme and queer genders. Across the exhibition, Monkman seeks to instill a sense
of survival and resilience in the face of trauma and violence that is crucial to creating
museum displays that do emotional as well as historical work and that resist the notion
that Indigenous people are dead and gone. In its efforts to provide a history that spans
not only 150 years of nationhood but includes Indigenous life before European settle-
ment and nation-building, the exhibition keeps the historical past tied to the present.
History is told with an eye to contemporary Indigenous resilience and active struggles
for sovereignty.
In this context, Monkman faces the challenge of how to represent historical trauma in a way
that makes space for the affective force of loss and mourning, without letting it dominate. At the
crux of the exhibition along with the Daddies section, and creating a kind of rupture within it, is
the room titled “Forcible Transfer of Children,” which focuses on the removal of children from
140 Ann Cvetkovich

their families and home territories and placement in Indian residential schools. Here Miss Chief’s
often cheeky commentary goes almost silent. This chapter of the brochure (Monkman 2017),
which also appears as the wall text, reads simply: “This is the one I cannot talk about. The pain is
too deep. We were never the same.” Questions about how to represent this history have been at
the center of efforts to reckon with the past such as the controversial Truth and Reconciliation
Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Monkman has talked about his difficulty in repre-
senting this chapter in Canadian history, which is deeply connected to the present and to efforts
at reconciliation that include the Canada 150 projects, because he did not want to dwell in
trauma but rather focus on resilience. Against black walls that create a somber mood, he sur-
rounds his own painting The Scream (2016) with Iroquois, Cree, Plains Ojibwa, and Sahaptin
cradleboards. A tumult of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in their bright red jackets,
together with nuns and priests in black, grab children while their mothers scream and struggle to
keep them. The blood red jackets of the Mounties and the other bold colors add to the dyna-
mism of the violence depicted, and the large figures make a strong contrast with the miniature
people and animals of the landscape paintings. There is an active tug of war, a literal wrestling of
bodies tangled together and torn apart, as two Mounties in the foreground pull a mother away
from her child who is held by a priest. Monkman’s capacity for depicting the erotic body now
turns to the task of depicting bodies torn apart and away from each other, seized and twisted in
the literal moment of capture and physical separation. Children lie on the ground, but a group is
running away into the distance, representing the active resistance that is also present in the
screams and interrupted embraces of the mothers. The Scream represents Monkman’s search for
another kind of painting, and he leaves behind the humor of Miss Chief and her capacity to be a
kind of guardian angel. Seagulls and crows stand over as witnesses and likely fellow screamers,
but otherwise there is no rescue for these mothers and their children, not in this moment.
But Monkman’s painting is accompanied by the installation of cradleboards that represent
Indigenous ways of caring for children, and his curation of Indigenous forms of material
culture and art transforms the meaning of his solo art practice. He has placed the cradleboards
on the walls along with empty spaces for “ghostboards” to represent two absences: the
exterminated first peoples of the land that has become Canada, and the widespread loss
caused by the residential school system as a form of incarceration and acculturation. Monk-
man’s installation of his painting within this broader context of Indigenous artifacts and forms
of material culture integrates art and craft, refusing distinctions between aesthetics and utility
that have underwritten the marginalization of Indigenous arts and the separation of art gal-
leries and museums. The installation also includes a vitrine that displays leather and bead
crafts that children offered to the school principal at the Grouard Residential School in
Alberta. Monkman’s curatorial choices mix violence with beauty, showcasing the creativity
that was part of the strange intimacies of residential school life. The beading and leatherwork
that go into these cradleboards and the ghostboards indicate both the loss of children and the
persistence of their material remains. By placing the painting in the company of the cradle-
boards that soothed babies, Monkman forges connections across time and Indigenous nations
and offers a hint of resilience. In addition to telling the story of removal and showcasing
Indigenous making (which took place even within the residential school), Monkman creates
space for cries and screams, and for silence, all of which are part of the affective power of the
exhibition. Its aim is not just to document the history of Indigenous peoples, but also to
provide space for feelings of loss and sadness that have not generally been part of national
museums and galleries that celebrate the Canadian nation.
 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice 141

Wilderness Kingdom, archival documents, and angels of resilience

The closing sections of the exhibition turn toward the contemporary, and Monkman’s own
work and presence in the exhibition shifts. The paintings depict scenes combining realism and
fantasy – bears appear on the street or next to houses, and angels hover over spectacles of vio-
lence. Using his hometown of Winnipeg to foreground the city as a site of Indigenous culture,
Monkman provides an education in contemporary Indigenous life, which is urban even as it has
its roots in nature, as evident through the presence of bears and other animals. Monkman also
references histories of modernist art, including a cubist figure modeled after Picasso, and he has
spoken of how the modernist flattening and reduction of pictorial space reflects the squeezing
and compressing of Indigenous life, offering an Indigenous frame on modernist art. Although
Monkman acknowledges ongoing problems of alcohol and drug use, poverty, illness, police
surveillance, and incarceration, he also shows survival and the resilience named in the exhibition
title, undoing the museumification of Indigenous people that has been one way of containing
them and making them disappear. Many of the paintings feature angels who look like they have
been dropped in from Renaissance paintings to provide assistance, as well as further appearances
from Miss Chief (who plays femme matador fighting a Picassoesque bull in Seeing Red, 2014). In
the brochure (Monkman 2017) and wall text for these chapters of the exhibition, Miss Chief
presents herself as a queer femme figure, like the angels in the paintings, who reminds her people
of their power and signals hope for the future. She announces: “I shine brightly for these souls
through the darkness, slaying savage masculine force with the dazzling power of my beauty and
allure. I am the light, the two-spirited gentle man and fierce woman.” Monkman’s remarkable
capacity to present gender variability, and especially high-femme performance, as central to his
vision for a resilience grounded in beauty also informs the exhibition’s commitment to the
colonial aesthetics of color, texture, and the material craft of artmaking.
The Urban Rez paintings dominate the contemporary section of the exhibition. I want to close
my discussion by focusing on Monkman’s curatorial choices here, as one more example of how
his work as painter is amplified by his strategies as curator. In these final sections of the exhibition,
he installs his paintings alongside another diorama and archival artifacts, bringing into the present
the genres of display that open the exhibition and are associated with the colonial museum and
the historical past. The persistence of these genres suggests a recursive relation to time and
Monkman’s ongoing willingness to recontextualize rather than banish colonial museum prac-
tices. Not giving up museum genres but instead using them to bring Indigenous people to life in
the museum, Monkman offers a startling version of a nativity scene in which he is the Christ
child, another person of low birth, lying on a Hudson’s Bay blanket. Bearing an adult head, the
baby is flanked by a father figure in a Chicago Blackhawks hockey shirt and a mother dangling a
crucifix, all in a humble shack stocked with bottles of Coke, tins of corned beef, and other junk
food. The potential sacrilege of putting himself in the position of Christ is a brilliant way to claim
Christianity as belonging to Indigenous people, too, and it also alludes to their suffering and
sacrifice. The Holy Family scenario is repeated on the wall in an altarpiece titled Love Conquers
All (2017) that frames the Native family in ornate gold. In a nearby corner, praying hands in the
form of a silicone dildo are not only a blatant display of the erotic but another way that Miss
Chief unabashedly inserts herself into the exhibition.
While featuring Monkman’s work very prominently, this closing area of the exhibition
also returns to the archive through the inclusion of a series of 1840s manuscript pages from
Wilderness Kingdom by Nicolas Point, SJ, which are in the collection of the Archive of the
142 Ann Cvetkovich

Jesuits in Canada. Point, who spent a winter in the Rocky Mountains with the Blackfeet and
the Peigan on a mission to convert them, provides an unusual document of Indigenous
worlds through his close proximity to them. He depicts their lifeways and the animals and
landscapes of the natural environment through elaborate color images of “Indians.” In these
works, colonial representation takes on a surreal beauty, for example, in a portrait of an
Indigenous man wearing an animal headdress and holding an open paint box. Point’s vivid
use of color – in repeated motifs such as the blaze of a fire, the night sky illuminated by stars,
the apparition of a sacred heart – shows an aesthetic excess that once again clearly appeals to
Monkman’s camp sensibility. Point’s syncretic mix of Indigenous and Christian scenes pro-
vides inspiration for Monkman’s use of Christianity. That this final room of the exhibition
continues to include historical artifacts, even while focused on the present, demonstrates
Monkman’s capacious power to repurpose the archive and take inspiration from the color
and beauty of the Jesuit father’s artistic imagination. Aesthetic appreciation becomes a way to
make even colonialist collections and objects the vehicle for his own vision of angelic
transcendence as resilience, and for a material practice of shapeshifting transubstantiation.
Monkman embraces the archive as a form of access to Indigenous histories, drawing on two-
spirit erotics in order to hold together multiple realities – male/female, colonizer/colonized,
text/image, past/present – rather than dividing or separating them.

Regional specificity and Shame and Prejudice on “national” tour

Since its opening at University of Toronto in March 2017, Shame and Prejudice has traveled across
Canada to museums in Calgary, Kingston, Charlottetown, Halifax, Montreal, London (Ontario),
Winnipeg, and Vancouver. Monkman has adapted the exhibition to each location, not only by
redesigning it for different spaces, but also by incorporating materials from local institutions. He
has borrowed photographs and cradleboards from Calgary’s Glenbow, Catlin reproductions from
Montreal’s McCord, and table settings and Poundmaker’s (or Pîhtokahanapiwiyin’s) moccasins
from Ottawa’s Museum of Canadian History. By drawing from collections in the host institu-
tions, his intervention is immediate and relevant – illustrating that each place must change. He
has also had to adapt to space limitations, sometimes showing truncated versions of the installa-
tions or rearranging the historical sequence. While the full exhibition is obviously optimal, part
of its flexibility is that it can be smaller and still provide its lessons. The diverse arrangements yield
different focal points and juxtapositions, rather than a monolithic history, and past and present
can come together rather than being separated by linear chronology.
Particularly important to Monkman’s vision of Indigenous history is regional specificity,
especially his own Cree heritage and early life in Winnipeg. The city, which has one of the
highest urban Indian populations in the country, features prominently in the Urban Rez
paintings. The exhibition’s histories of incarceration and treaties focus on the Cree chiefs
Poundmaker and Big Bear, whose imprisonment at Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Winni-
peg is depicted through archival photographs from Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. The West
Coast Indigenous peoples prominent in museums throughout the world are hardly present
here, and Monkman instead focuses on early contact in the East and the peoples of the Great
Plains. The inclusion of the history of New France, prior to Confederation, allows him to
showcase the fur trade that was so central to the settlement of Hudson’s Bay and the Great
Lakes region, and to present-day Manitoba. Thus, although the exhibition is national in
scope, it does not aim to be comprehensive and is instead available to be read for local and
 Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice 143

regional meanings. Contributing to this strategy is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s multi-gen-
dered and irreverent presence, including her personal voice in the exhibition text, which
avoids the impersonal or universalizing point of view of many museum surveys.
The exhibition will close its tour in 2020 at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver, which has done groundbreaking work in taking Indigenous
culture out of an ethnographic frame and showcasing it as art. The museum has been trying to
address Indigenous cultures and histories from a decolonial perspective for some time, including
partnerships with contemporary Indigenous artists in residence and with Indigenous commu-
nities. It will be interesting to see how Monkman’s queer curation and regional specificity will
contribute to the museum’s ongoing efforts to transform itself and to address in its own way
critiques of Canada 150 and the Truth and Reconciliation process as forms of containment of
Indigenous struggles for self-determination and material power. His use of femme and two-spirit
genders and erotics to establish an affective relation to the museum, and his use of humorous
play and not sorrow alone to engage with the continuing consequences of a violent history,
make queer indigeneity central to the decolonial museum. It is quite likely that the
irreverent and flamboyant Miss Chief will find a way to unsettle and further extend the
Museum of Anthropology’s commitment to Indigenous cultural sovereignty.

Notes
1 Shame and Prejudice was commissioned by the University of Toronto Museum and opened there in
March 2017.
2 Other exhibitions with Monkman’s curatorial interventions include My Treaty is With the Crown
(Concordia University, Montreal, 2011), The Big Four (Glenbow Museum, Calgary, 2013), and
Welcome to the Studio (McCord Museum, Montreal, 2014), as well as a recent curatorial commission
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
3 Publication of an exhibition catalogue has been delayed, but video documentation of lectures by
Monkman for the University of Toronto and Queens University installations have been useful for
my chapter. In addition to being both curator and artist, Monkman is an articulate spokesperson for
his own work.
4 For more on queer indigeneity, see Driskill, et al. 2011, and Justice, et al. 2010, both of which
feature Monkman’s work on the cover.
5 My comments are based on the version of the exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.
Because the exhibition has had to adapt to many spaces in its extensive tour across Canada, it has been
displayed in different sequences and selections. For example, at the Agnes Etherington Gallery at
Queens University, the New France section, including The Scent of a Beaver, could not be displayed.
The exhibition opened with Monkman’s adaptation of the Fathers of Confederation portrait, The
Daddies, and the table display was in the next room. At the University of Toronto, where the exhi-
bition opened, it had a reverse chronology and began with the Urban Rez paintings and contemporary
Indigenous resilience. The archival artifacts had to be confined to certain rooms with the right con-
ditions for conservation. One of the powers of Monkman’s curation is its adaptability to different
spaces and contexts, revealing the multivalent capacity of the materials to create new meanings.
6 Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (Karp and Wilson 1996) offers another example of mingling
luxury items and objects related to oppression in order to make a statement regarding imperialism
and oppression.
7 In some versions of the exhibition where there is not enough room for the full New France sec-
tions, The Daddies has been placed up front as the opening display.
8 A photograph of the original painting may be seen at http://activehistory.ca/2016/07/the-robert-ha
rris-group-portrait/ (Martin 2016). Rex Woods’ 1968 reconstruction of the original can be seen at http
s://www.ourcommons.ca/About/HistoryArtsArchitecture/fine_arts/historical/609-e.htm. The origi-
nal plan was to depict the twenty-three “founding fathers” and secretary Hewitt Bernard, who attended
the 1864 conference in Charlottetown, but the setting was changed to a later conference in Quebec.
144 Ann Cvetkovich

The design was modified to include ten additional men who attended that meeting. The painting is ripe
material for Monkman’s artistic intervention given the creative license taken with the historical record
at the outset and the multiple reproductions of the original. His inclusion of the sketches and other
accompanying materials suggests how history is constructed through such paintings and opens the door
for his own creative reconstruction of that history.
9 For a discussion of the significance of Hudson’s Bay blankets, see chapter 12 in this volume.
10 In the smaller version of the exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Gallery at Queens University, The
Daddies and The Bears of Confederation were placed next to one another at the beginning of the
exhibition. Set this way, these two paintings make a powerful statement, underscoring the cen-
trality of the reworking of the Fathers of Confederation and of history painting more generally to
Monkman’s overall project.

References
Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds. 2011. Queer
Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Justice, Daniel Heath, Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, eds. 2010. “Sexuality, Nationality, Indi-
geneity.” Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16:1–2.
Karp, Ivan, and Fred Wilson. 1996. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums.” In Thinking
About Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 251–267. New
York: Routledge.
Martin, Ged. 2016. “The Robert Harris Group Portrait.” ActiveHistory.ca. July 10. http://activehistory.
ca/2016/07/the-robert-harris-group-portrait/.
Monkman, Kent. 2017. Shame and Resilience: A Story of Resilience. Exhibition brochure. Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Museums.
12
ALL THAT MOVES US
Bodies in Land

Camille Georgeson-Usher

The ways in which Indigenous bodies infiltrate the knotted, intricate spaces of the gallery are
deeply complex; in these rooms, Indigenous female, two-spirit, nonbinary, trans and/or
queer bodies confront a history of colonialism. As we increasingly enter exhibitionary insti-
tutions, we claim and hold space for our past, present, and future. In this chapter, I draw on
performance-based practices as well as Indigenous theories to show how women are chal-
lenging institutional, artistic, and academic histories and structures. Using our bodies in places
where they have so often been unwelcome, we refuse dominant narratives; we respond to
unbodying or physical dispossession with acts of assertion or rebodying. To illustrate these
points, I will draw primarily on the art that was on display in Entering the Landscape (Fall
2017) at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Jenifer Papararo and
Sarah Nesbitt curated this exhibition, which featured film, video, photography, sculpture,
and performance by twenty-one artists. Exhibitions of this kind create sites for integral and
urgent exchange that disrupts difficult histories affecting us all, whether we accept these his-
tories or not. Such exchanges pave the way for Indigenous voices to be heard as well as for
bodies to reassert sovereignty. Like other projects described in this book, this activism is one
form of human rights work.

Back/ground: Histories of exclusion and new curatorial interventions

In 1991, Mohawk curator Lee-Ann Martin wrote a report for the Canada Council titled
“The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art Museums
in Canada.” In this text, she brings forward the notions of hard and soft inclusion of Indi-
genous peoples in institutional spaces. Her document calls on those in power to transcend soft
inclusion, which places Indigenous peoples in temporary roles or positions with little to no
authority. She proposes hard inclusion instead, urging museums to make global changes,
altering their governing structures and fundamental ideologies. Systemic change implies
respecting our stories, knowledge, and opinions at every level of the institution.
As part of her argument for meaningful inclusion, Martin (2002) calls attention to Kant’s
hierarchical theories of aesthetics, which define what constitutes beauty as well as what does
146 Camille Georgeson-Usher

not fit within those parameters. Kant’s beliefs parallel late nineteenth-century anthropologists’
convictions that Indigenous art and artifacts belonged to cultures of the past. Works by
Indigenous peoples were therefore to be exhibited in ethnographic or natural history muse-
ums while European objects were placed in art museums. These theories continue to affect
Indigenous peoples because multiple art museums continue to privilege European concep-
tions of beauty (2002). Martin has confronted these practices throughout her career, calling
for curators to be more self-critical, to recognize damaging signs and signifiers embedded in
their presentations of Indigenous art, and to challenge the authority of European definitions
of beauty (2002). She proposes new models of representation that bring Indigenous voices,
knowledge, sexualities, and ancestral wisdom into the museum for everyone’s benefit.
The urgent need for Indigenous recognition in public spaces is also iterated in the book
Red Skin, White Masks (2014) by Dene political scientist Glen Coulthard. Condemning the
way Indigenous peoples have been dispossessed of their lands, Coulthard argues for a politics
of recognition that accounts for space and power: “I call this place-based foundation of
Indigenous decolonial thought and practice grounded normativity, by which I mean the mod-
alities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledges that
inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with
human and non-human others over time” (13). By extension, researchers, curators, artists,
and professionals must position themselves in ways that force mainstream audiences to per-
ceive and respond to deeply embedded and normalized colonial values, an important step
toward recognizing the contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous curators have responded to these calls in several ways. The fourth iteration of
Tiotià:ke’s (Montreal, Quebec) La Biennale d’Art Contemporain Autochtone (BACA), titled
Nichiwamiském/Nimidet/Ma Sœur/My Sister, centered upon Indigenous women. The curators,
Niki Little and Becca Taylor, chose this theme to recognize women who shape community
and become sisters through love, friendship, and care. Their use of multiple languages illus-
trates how we come together; in their curatorial text, they posit that “Our identities
combined in a space mobilise the now, acknowledging the narrative of our ancestors and re-
writing our inclusion, in our terms, showing the transformability through non-linear time, an
interchangeable and united connection we have with tradition and futurism” (2018, 5). As
Cree-Métis-Saultaux curator, editor, and writer Lindsay Nixon indicates (2018), this series of
women-focused exhibitions, actions, and discussions was an active gesture of refusing toxic
masculinity and cisgender straight men.
Inuk scholar and curator Dr Heather Igloliorte has also been at the forefront in
developing groundbreaking exhibitions that challenge the politics of exclusion by ensur-
ing there is gallery space for Inuit voices. She conducts this work from within as opposed
to being someone looking in who cannot comprehend what it means to be Inuit from
Nunatsiavut or, more broadly, Indigenous in Canada. When invited to curate the new
permanent exhibition of Inuit art at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec
(MNBAQ), Igloliorte proposed to incorporate Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) into the pro-
cess. At its most basic level, IQ means Inuit traditional knowledge; quoting Shirley
Tagalik, Igloliorte refers to IQ as “that which Inuit have always known to be true”
(2017, 102). IQ respects the living knowledge of ancestors, artistic practices being an
important way to pass on this knowledge. As an example, for her exhibition SakKijâjuk:
Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, Igloliorte conducted community consultations that began
by asking Inuit in her home territory what they might need to create their best work.
 All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land 147

Artists were then sent supplies to make museum-quality work that was exhibited as part
of a community exhibition the following year. They received full compensation if their
piece sold. A year later, this became the first nationally touring exhibition of Labrador
Inuit art; artists’ stories echoed through the exhibition spaces, while their artwork and
that of ancestors took form along walls and on plinths. It illustrated the importance of
creating space for and honoring Indigenous stories.

Unbodied/rebodying
Creating space for and honoring stories is intricately connected to Indigenous notions of the
body and embodiment. Driftpile Cree member Billy-Ray Belcourt’s painfully beautiful This
Wound is a World (2017a) describes the state of being unbodied in two ways. The first is
being trapped by a long line of historical implications of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
relations: “my body, like the land, was up for grabs” (37). The second is a necessary turbu-
lence within love, especially same-sex love: “an elder told me to be a man and to decolonize
in the same breath. There are days when I want to wear nail polish more than i want to
protest. . . . and even though i know i am too queer to be sacred anymore, I dance that
broken circle dance because i am still waiting for hands that want to hold mine too” (17).
This quotation illustrates how love and colonialism come together in emotions of loss and
alienation from the body. Belcourt explains that being unbodied “is the ‘sadder than that’ of
love, but it is also love’s first condition of possibility. That indigeneity births us into a relation
of non-sovereignty is not solely coloniality’s dirty work” (2017b, 49).
Nevertheless, colonialism created a need for us to detach ourselves from our bodies,
because they were marked as inferior. According to Belcourt, public exposure tears away at
our bodies, our teachings, our memories of ancestors, and the land we tread: “the history of
the colonial world is a history of natives being too present” (45). It is difficult to hide from or
confront histories that have challenged Indigenous sovereignty on every level, including
residential schools, forced assimilation, sled-dog slaughters, relocation, the sixties scoop,
missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, astronomical rates of suicide, unba-
lanced foster care systems, deliberate contagion, resource denial, housing shortages, and the
racialization of our bodies.
Shame associated with Indigenous bodies developed as one of colonialism’s most potent
tools, its humiliations tainting sexuality, gender, identity, and even sacred power, as Belcourt
indicates above. Our traditions emphasize how our bodies are integrally linked to the land,
but European discourse constructed them as part of a larger colonial project. In particular,
Christianity distorted Indigenous women’s bodies, classifying them as subordinate to men.
The shame that was passed down made both settlers and Indigenous peoples believe that
Indigenous women’s warrior power posed a threat. In my own Coast Salish culture, women
have historically been commanding, as storied by Stó:lo- nation member Lee Maracle in “First
Wives Club: Salish Style.” Explicit gestures of desire were infused into everyday life. If Salish
women desired someone, with a quick glance and slide of their hips, they could do as they
pleased. These women would use their sexual prowess to lure men not only for pleasure but
to ensure that they helped with necessary tasks (Maracle 2008). Sexual practices such as these
challenged European ways of being, so Indigenous women’s desires were suppressed. Separ-
ating expressions of desire that had been part of daily life into a silo of shame ignored how
sexuality influenced our actions, past, present, and future.
148 Camille Georgeson-Usher

As women of color, we have learned to steer through what are often unknown and
unsafe spaces in careful, calculated ways. Being unbodied represents dispossession but
also a way of existing and protecting ourselves as Indigenous peoples: “it is also what
emerges from a commitment to the notion that the body is an assemblage, a mass of
everyone who’s ever moved us, for better or for worse” (Belcourt 2017b, 49). Here,
Belcourt recognizes Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Beta-
samosake Simpson’s book Islands of Decolonial Love (2013), where she explains the
“sadder than that” of being unbodied as not necessarily wrong. It may lead to a sort of
reclamation, pulling us outside of our bodies in a continual process of becoming while
recognizing the beauty of the mess and chaos. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s and Leanne Beta-
samosake Simpson’s philosophies encourage us to love the broken pieces. If to
be unbodied refers to colonial dispossession and violence that render it difficult to love
one’s own body, to rebody is to reclaim sovereignty over one’s self, to reappropriate
brown bodies.

My Body, The Land and The Ice: Teachings

Indigenous women’s art presents bodies that challenge historically dominating narratives
of dispossession or unbodying. The first works in the Plug In’s main gallery space address
embodiment, alongside pieces by artists like Cuban-American Ana Mendieta and Cree,
Saulteaux, and Métis Lori Blondeau. A stunning series of photographs of Métis woman
Amy Malbeuf, Unbodied Rebirth (2011), renders Belcourt’s concept of the unbodied in
visual form. Documented by Métis, Saulteaux, and Polish artist Dayna Danger, the
images depict Malbeuf dressed in bright spandex and surrounded by Banff’s winter
landscape. As the series progresses, Malbeuf pulls off layer by layer, changing and shifting
color. Her figure is ultimately curled up, naked. It is as though once she loses the gar-
ments that hide her body’s identity, Malbeuf is delicately woven back into the land. This
image series is “sadder than that” because we might feel the strain of (be)coming into a
body dressed in synthetic fabric and then being woven back into the land. This process
occurs within a wild and beautiful mess of a landscape that allows us to see ourselves and
how we got to where we are.
Another piece in the exhibition, Arctic Hysteria (1996) by Greenlandic artist Pia Arke
(1958–2007), demonstrates how the eponymous “syndrome” dehumanized Inuit women,
depriving them of agency. Arctic hysteria or Pibloktoq was a product of Victorian science and
medicine (Dick 1995); according to Stefan Jonsson (2017), there is no evidence that it truly
existed. Supposedly, it caused Inuit women to lose their sanity, taking off their clothes before
running screaming into Arctic landscapes. The disease was blamed on inferior lifestyles and
served to strip Inuit women of sovereignty over their bodies. After finding an image in an
archive in New York, Arke undertook research on Pibloktoq (Jonsson 2017). Her performa-
tive video work Arctic Hysteria addresses refusal on many levels. Arke lies naked on top of an
image of an Arctic landscape, slowly pulling it apart, shredding it. Her lack of shame over her
nakedness refuses European colonial dominance over Indigenous women’s bodies, and her
deliberate actions challenge European myths about their mental status (2017). She demon-
strates that white male scientists or academics are often wrong, omitting or distorting cultural
traditions because they are telling stories that aren’t theirs to tell. In this way, her work
constitutes an act of rebodying.
 All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land 149

Body this
The exhibition gifts us with glimpses of how we exist in our bodies and of the intersections
of desire, fear, fragility, strength, place, and time. Some Inuit teachings show how we
(humans) are minor, almost invisible microcosms within an immense trajectory of daily
activity. Related teachings draw attention to and challenge self-importance; they also tell us
to take only what is needed.
Greenlandic performance artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s work in the exhibition draws
on these concepts even as it mingles and plays with gender and sexuality. Williamson Bathory has
explained how uaajeerneq mask dancing explores concepts of fear, humor, and sexuality while
challenging received notions of comfort. With teasing gestures known as aqausiit (Williamson
Bathory 2011), the dance teaches us to consider our existence in relation to one another and to
our impulses, desires, and reactions. Uaajeerneq mask dancers prepare for a performance by cov-
ering their face with transparent grease. This is layered with thick black pigment; fingernails then
scrape back parts of the black pigment, revealing flesh and making space for luscious deep red
pigment.1 North Greenlandic actress Makka Kleist explains how each color is representative of
deeper meanings and teachings. The red, often applied in a V on the forehead and around the
eyes, symbolizes female sexuality, while balls placed into the performer’s cheeks reference male
sexuality and anatomy (Kleist 2008, 15–19). When performing, a uaajeerneq dancer will often
walk through the audience with creepy, slinky movements and gesture sexually at adults while
goofily scaring children. For adults, it is a playful celebration of lust and desire, while it teaches
children how to understand and respond to fear. When we must confront discomfort in a public
environment, this humor becomes a potent tool for dealing with fear or pain.
Williamson Bathory’s contribution to Entering the Landscape enacted these concepts in down-
town Winnipeg. Mounted on four large monitors, her 2016 video piece Timiga, Nunalu Sikulu
(My Body, The Land and The Ice) played on a continuous loop at all hours of the day for the
duration of the exhibition. This six-minute performative video takes viewers slowly through a
wide Arctic landscape, panning in and out of rocks, land, and ice while tracing the back of
Williamson Bathory’s naked body, which reclines parallel to the nuna or tundra.2 The shadow of
a bird crosses fleetingly behind her. As the camera approaches, she turns toward viewers in full
uaajeerneq mask, grinding the balls around in her mouth and snarling. These gestures push viewers
outside their bodily comfort zones. We rarely expect to confront unease or embarrassment with
the naked or sexual body in galleries or museum spaces; for the most part, we are still accustomed
to odalisques and aesthetically softened Eurocentric views of the female body. However, this
work yields new ways of understanding the important roles of fear, humor, and sexuality as
protective yet simultaneously liberatory (Williamson Bathory 2011).
Alize Zorlutuna’s video piece Stroke (2014) also explicitly addresses discomfort around sex and
sexuality. Within the video frame, two hands rub a part of a tree that resembles spread legs. The
hands move faster and faster, as if giving the tree pleasure – Zorlutuna refuses narrow religious
views of sexuality, suggesting other means of expression (including trees). This video is uncom-
fortable to watch and forces viewers to question whether their reactions are based on European
colonial conventions policing sexual acts. Even though Zorlutuna is not Indigenous, she
encourages viewers to question their own complicity in Eurocentric systems of oppression.
Through such works, Entering the Landscape embraces intangible and “unspeakable” ideas; it
brings forward conversations about flesh that many would consider taboo.
150 Camille Georgeson-Usher

Body in landscape
Entering the Landscape exemplified intimate engagement with the body through performance
and the camera’s lens. The color red connected the pieces, sensually drawing viewers to the
markings on Williamson Bathory’s face and to Mohawk artist Melissa General’s filmed
performance Reclamation (2014).
In this piece, General walks a long line of red fabric that trails away into water. The red
lightens to reveal an image of fellow artist Blondeau wearing a bikini and standing in the
snow next to a pink surfboard in Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997). This startling physical image
reclaims the word squaw from stereotypes and challenges viewers to rethink its meaning. This
act of reclamation is also one of rebodying.
The theme continues with Meryl McMaster’s Tilsam (2010), which questions identity on
many levels. McMaster’s face is almost entirely covered with wood that resembles a mask.
The wood refers to her Indigenous (Plains Cree) connections to the land, while her hands
are bound in woven white fabric, signifying that she is tethered to settler ancestry. In Lean To
(I) and (II), by Métis artist Jaime Black, the photographer stands amid branches that extend
from her neck in the first image, while in the second image she kneels on the fallen branches
as though her body is conceding to collapse. The titles of these works refer to a temporary,
easily collapsing habitation built out of materials that are available on the land. The body is
neither shelter nor sheltered. In the curatorial text accompanying this exhibition, Nesbitt
explains, “the immediacy and vulnerability of ‘the body’ as something prone to resisting and
submitting to various structural and social constraints – often simultaneously – is given space
to stage its struggles; explore and expand its limitations; mourn loss, express taboo intimacies
and pleasure; collapse distance, challenge stereotypes, and present cultural knowledge and
world views” (Nesbitt 2017). Here, Nesbitt underlines the proximity of submission and
resistance in a sentence that ends with an assertion of indigeneity.

FIGURE 12.1 Still from Melissa General, Reclamation, 2014

Source: © Melissa General.
 All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land 151

A tear in a photo, fingers over the grains of wood, flesh on snow – these tactile images
invited viewers into conversation. Through carefully selected works, Entering the Landscape
conceptualized ways in which unruly bodies connect to the land. Specifically, by drawing
attention to issues of dominance, possession, and sovereignty, the curators were able to bring
forward diverse perspectives on desire, sensuality, and sexuality, natural parts of how bodies
navigate the world.

Shaking out the bones

The Plug In exhibition also offered more direct confrontations with its themes. The gallery’s
bright street-facing room has floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. Looking out over one
of Winnipeg’s major intersections, it sits perpendicular to one of the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany’s (HBC) flagship stores. This spatial orientation is of particular significance because since
its creation in 1670, HBC has played an active role in the colonial project, participating in
the fur trade and manufacturing what became known as smallpox blankets. The latter were
used to control and kill Indigenous populations across North America, despite or because of
the blanket’s ceremonial role in many Indigenous communities (Daschuk 2013). To
emphasize how Entering the Landscape considered the land in relation to bodies, the curators
placed artworks so they confronted the HBC building. In the wall-size photograph Waaschign
(2017), Anishinaabe artist Maria Hupfield stands atop a building that looks toward New York
City as she holds a painting by her late mother depicting Georgian Bay, on the northeastern
edge of Lake Huron in Ontario. Linking past, present, and future, Hupfield asserts agency
in placing her body above stolen lands and creating a multilayered landscape. The work
constitutes an act of rebodying or reappropriation of Indigenous bodies, lands, and stories.3

Radical accountabilities
The refusal of colonial-based recognition, histories, and policies permits us to see ourselves
and our place in the world. Through these perpetual acts of protection, we have the tools to
see our future selves with and for one another. If we are following the methodological
inquiries of Indigenous thinkers such as those cited in this chapter, it is up to us to engage in
even deeper theorization of multiple forms of relationality. This process will allow us to
recognize the unbodied and the need for rebodying others and ourselves. Our Indigenous
bodies are sacred. They are, in fact, “more than just flesh” (A. Simpson 2014a).
Refusal holds an important role in challenging the institutional structures imbued with
systemic racism and sexism that we have to navigate every day. Our acts of refusal come in
many forms. Gerald Vizenor (1994) asserts the power of survivance, a term which brings
together survival and resistance to explain how Indigenous peoples can use their cultural
strength to fight colonialism and racial dominance. Audra Simpson (2014b) points to survi-
vance as one reason for colonialism’s continuous failures; she argues that resistance protects
and cultivates Indigenous sovereignty. Simpson continues to define the many forms and
layers of sovereignty. In “nested sovereignty,” layers extend outside the structures of settler
governance. Finally, she asserts that the dominant academic methods of “knowing” Indi-
genous peoples are incomplete. By inserting our bodies into structures of knowledge on our
own terms, as the artists and thinkers discussed in this chapter have done, we refuse cate-
gorization and create our own living histories. We ensure that nothing becomes settled by
152 Camille Georgeson-Usher

refusing settlers’ traditions. We begin to see rebodying through curatorial practices that reject
what colonial history and society has slyly tricked us to believe. When nothing about fellow
humans is presumed, we make space to learn and to foster more meaningful conversations.
In the book As We Have Always Done (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson unfolds the
concept of radical resistance through acts of care. Pulling from the work of Audra Simpson and
Glen Coulthard, she demonstrates that we are more than “damaged goods,” asking, “what if we
had organized outside of the politics of recognition, refused identity politics, and categorically
refused the hetero-patriarchy of the Indian Act? … What if no one sided with colonialism? …
Resurgent organizing must create a future generation that never has to ask how to live free,
because they’ve never known anything else – a generation that does not know shame, because
they are embedded in each other’s light” (L. Simpson, 2017, 177, 189). Resurgent organizing
can be seen through museological and curatorial practices in exhibits such as Entering the Land-
scape, which combine collectivity with the many forms of Indigenous knowledge, intertwining
our ways of being and learning from one another. Grounded normativity, at its most basic level,
enables us to choose who and what to center, even as it connects us through our accountability
to one another, our ancestors, and descendants.
The persistence of our bodies that are grounded in the landscape is an act of refusal. Museum
and gallery practices that present this refusal accompanied by care and connectivity offer glimpses of
how grounded normativity and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit are forms of radical resistance. Indigenous artists
such as the ones in Entering the Landscape call to each other, and we have to hear them. Even if we
see only traces of each other’s unbodied selves working to rebody, we must recognize each other’s
presence in innovative and risky exhibitions like this one. Curatorial and artistic strategies generate
radical forms of love among us, even as they engage us in essential human rights activism.

Notes
1 Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory has made the practice of uaajeerneq known to the world. She chal-
lenges dominant spaces with her practice, unapologetically using her body. The #callresponse project
held by the Grunt Gallery in Vancouver (McCann 2016) provides useful context.
2 Williamson Bathory prefers the term nuna, which means the land, for describing Arctic tundra.
3 This was the first time Hupfield’s piece was exhibited. It was also one of fifty images included in the
Resilience billboard exhibition across Canada, which was designed to make the work of First Nations,
Inuit, and Métis women highly visible.

References
An Act to Amend the Indian Act. 1985. Bill C-31, S.C. Ottawa: Government of Canada. http://la
ws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/I-5.pdf.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2017a. This Wound Is a World: Poems. Calgary: Frontenac House.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2017b. “To Be Unbodied.” Canadian Art 34(2): 49.
Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Daschuk, James William. 2013. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal
Life. Regina: University of Regina Press.
Dick, Lyle. 1995. “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?” Arctic
Anthropology 32(2): 1–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40316385.
Hupfield, Maria. 2017. “Maria Hupfield.” Resilience. https://resilienceproject.ca/en/artists/maria-hupfield.
 All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land 153

Igloliorte, Heather. 2017. “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art
Museum.” Art Journal 76(2): 100–113.
Jonsson, Stefan. 2017. “On Pia Arke.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 44(September): 12–21.
Kleist, Makka. 2008. “Pre-Christian Inuit Sexuality.” In Taylor 2008, 15–19.
Little, Niki, and Becca Taylor. 2018. “To and for One Another.” BACA: Nichiwamiském/Nimidet/Ma
Sœur/My Sister. Montreal: Éditions Art Mûr.
Maracle, Lee. 2008. “First Wives Club: Salish Style.” In Taylor 2008, 169–181.
Martin, Lee-Ann. 1991. The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art
Museums in Canada. A Report Submitted to the Canada Council. Ottawa: Canada Council for the Arts.
Martin, Lee-Ann. 2002. “Negotiating Space for Aboriginal Art.” In On Aboriginal Representation in the Gal-
lery, edited by Lynda Jessup and Shannon Bagg, 239–245. Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of
Civilization.
McCann, Ryan. 2016. “#callresponse - Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Tanya Tagaq NEC
Performance.” October 28. https://vimeo.com/193610785.
Nesbitt, Sarah. 2017. “Land.” Entering the Landscape. Winnipeg: Plug In ICA. https://plugin.org/exhi
bitions/entering-the-landscape/.
Nixon, Lindsay. 2018. “Who Benefits from the Indigenous Art Biennial?” Canadian Art, September 6.
https://canadianart.ca/essays/who-benefits-from-the-indigenous-art-biennial/.
Simpson, Audra. 2014a. “The Chief’s Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sover-
eignty.” Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms. Panel presentation at R.A.
C.E. Network’s 14th Annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference. October 17.
Edmonton, Alberta.
Simpson, Audra. 2014b. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2013. Islands of Decolonial Love. Winnipeg: ARP Books.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical
Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Task Force on Museums and First Peoples. 1994. Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships Between
Museums and First Peoples. Ottawa: Assembly of First Nations and Canadian Museums Association.
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Tungilik, Marius P. 2008. “The Dark Side of Sex.” In Taylor 2008, 50–58.
Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 1994. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan
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Williamson Bathory, Laakkuluk. 2011. “Aqausiit: Can You Hear How Much Love You Evoke In
Me?!” Native Studies Review 20(2): 1–29.
B. Bodies of Ambiguity
13
THE FUTURE OF MUSEOLOGICAL DISPLAY
Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters

Natasha Bissonauth

At the heart of Chitra Ganesh’s artistic practice is the desire to tell stories and intervene in
the storytelling tradition.1 Her projects Eyes of Time at the Brooklyn Museum (2014–2015)
and The Scorpion Gesture at the Rubin Museum (2018–2019) stage rich encounters between
permanent collections and temporary insertions – her site-specific mural and digital ani-
mations, respectively. She mines museums for objects representing the feminine divine that
have rarely, if ever, been displayed. In the process, she targets not only colonial residues in
collections, but also objects related to both white and brown imaginaries that forcibly
relegate the feminine to the margins. She then juxtaposes these objects with the future-
oriented, speculative, and/or science fiction aesthetic of her contemporary artworks, which
are already racialized and gendered. While bringing into sharper focus the fictions reified by
museological displays, Ganesh imagines a fiercely feminist future for museological display.
In Eyes of Time, Ganesh’s site-specific mural of the consortless goddess, Kali, towers over a
vitrine of artworks. The encased objects highlight instances – across time and geography –
of feminine power, ranging from sculptures of the ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet to
Louise Bourgeois’s iconic Eye drawings. Likewise, The Scorpion Gesture consists of digital
animations of mythological figures using a science fiction aesthetic. Ganesh’s animations are
not exhibited in their own dedicated space but immersed in the permanent collection of
objects depicting Asian mythology. Thus, by enacting a dynamic aesthetic of encounter that
invites viewers to imagine alternative narratives for the feminine form within permanent
collections, Ganesh incites another future for museological display.2

Queer possibility in speculative narratives

As a utopian call, queer of color theorist and performance studies scholar José Muñoz Esteban
engenders a theory of futurity that “see[s] and feel[s] beyond the quagmire of the present”
(2009, 1). In Cruising Utopia (2009), he defines cruising as a queer method of encounter that
sidelines the regulatory practice of accumulating and recording knowledge in favor of more
ephemeral connections. Muñoz’s radical aesthetic develops a blueprint for cruising beyond the
inadequate present toward the horizon of that which is not-yet-here/there. Several other
158 Natasha Bissonauth

scholars also address how speculative aesthetics center historically marginalized voices as min-
oritarian practice (Muñoz 1999).3 Compellingly, Alexis Lothian remarks in Old Futures (2018)
that “queer theory is itself often a practice of speculative fiction” (18). Afrofuturist, ethnofu-
turist, queer, and feminist narratives arguably make up the most interesting interventions within
the speculative tradition, given how the power of imagination is boldest “for those rendered
futureless by global white supremacy” and hetero-patriarchy – those “left out of dominant
imaginaries” (Lothian 2018, 26, 2).
I am especially attracted to the way Lothian examines the cross-fertilization of queer theories
of time with speculative cultural production. To speculate is to imagine “things otherwise than
they are, and [to create] stories from that impulse” (Lothian 2018, 15). Even more, “the act of
speculation, is to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining” since “imaginative
worlds … catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm” (Brown and
Lothian 2012).
Muñoz’s queer time and Lothian’s observations about queer possibility offer a useful
framework for Ganesh’s museological interventions. By placing the remixed permanent
collection in copresence with a speculative aesthetic, new narrative possibility emerges. Her
use of a speculative aesthetic works with the permanent collection; rather than completely
dismiss the past, she reworks conventional representations of transnational feminine forms
across time, critically engaging with what remains in collections. Ganesh deploys the spec-
ulative as a decolonizing4 tool in museological display, offering alternative futures unavail-
able within normative or dominant periodization that regulates museums. In disidentifying
with the museum – by engaging paradoxically with longstanding collections and in ima-
gining other modes of display – the opportunity emerges to tell another kind of story about
the feminine form.

Eyes of Time (2014–2015)

Ganesh’s speculative strategies in Eyes of Time are best understood in the context of her ear-
lier work. After receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 2002, Ganesh completed a
residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, during which she made Tales
of Amnesia. This artwork zine comprises pages, frames, images, and text wholly unrelated to
one another. They do not adhere to a linear narrative, yet these multiple, dissonant images
come together to foreground feminine sexuality and power. Most notably, the zine uses the
Indian comic book Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) as a point of departure; this series about Hindu
myth and Indian history has been published since 1967, with over one thousand issues to
date. Often told through a Hindu nationalist lens, ACK’s narratives also frame hetero-
normative tales about brave acts and dutiful characters. Ganesh grew up reading the series; in
rereading ACK as an adult, she encounters previously overlooked dissonance. Rather than
feeding her nostalgia, that quintessential diasporic longing for false origins, she reworks and
undermines the feeling to explore storytelling in unprecedented ways.
Given the series’ wide recognition across South Asia and its diaspora, ACK functions as a
familiar point of entry for Ganesh and her audience. Yet Tales of Amnesia creates new mytho-
graphies that undermine the source material’s narrative and iconographic logic. This is espe-
cially true for representations of women. The zine’s cover page, loosely based on ACK’s cover
for Tales of Hanuman (1971), features a centrally located character suspended between land and
sky. In both ACK and Tales of Amnesia, the heroic main figure appears on the brink of an epic
 Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters 159

adventure; however, Ganesh replaces the broadly built, muscular, adult monkey-god of ACK
with a monkey-girl. Whereas the flame-ridden landscape and Hanuman’s burning tail are ico-
nographic to those familiar with Hindu myth, Tales of Amnesia’s landscape intentionally avoids
such recognizable references. Furthermore, while Hanuman is a devoted disciple to Lord Rama
called to save the latter’s beloved consort Sita from the villainous Rawan, Ganesh’s monkey-
girl is not constrained by divine mission or mythic narrative sequence that leaves no room for
sheroes – only victims in need of rescue. Thus, even as Ganesh repudiates the ideological
underpinnings of myth and recovers gendered tropes from official canons, she creates her own
iconography, untethered to conventional modes of narration.
The text accompanying Tales of Amnesia’s cover supports this claim: “How to stage the story?
Her name was Amnesia, and it fit her like a brand new boxing glove.” Ganesh pointedly names
her protagonist Amnesia and sets her up for a battle: the challenge of constructing narrative. In
this particular naming, though, Ganesh arguably mobilizes a methodology of memory loss or
even forgetting as an alternative way of knowledge-making. Here I draw on The Queer Art of
Failure (2011), in which Jack Halberstam argues against memorialization and advocates instead for
erasure. He explains how “forgetting [can be] a way of resisting heroic and grand logics of recall
and unleashes new forms of memory” (15). As such, he develops a method of unknowing as
“relate[d] to … lost genealogies [and] to erasure [versus] inscription” (15). Ganesh’s Amnesia
embodies such alternative modes of (un)knowing that undercut the authority and confines of
teleological historical inquiry. Tales of Amnesia asks questions without seeking answers and stages a
story without any allegiance to narrative logic as the crux of its dissonance.5
Like the zine, Eyes of Time reimagines the possibilities of narrative logic through feminine form
in myth, but this time, Ganesh restages the story of museological display itself. A major aspect of
the project comprised exhibiting objects Ganesh selected from the permanent collection along-
side her own textual descriptions. Located in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler
Center for Feminist Art, Ganesh displayed objects from ethnographic collections of the past
together with objects classified as contemporary art within a single glass vitrine – an uncommon
and provocative move for an art museum. For example, she placed two bronze sculptures toge-
ther: an Egyptian statue of a seated Sekhmet from 664–332 BCE and a standing seventeenth-
century Kali from Kerala, India. These stood just outside the glass vitrine in which she exhibited
The Goddess Matangi, a Rajasthani watercolor from 1760; Untitled (1991; from the set Banshee
Pearls), a lithograph by Kiki Smith; Eyes (1996), a drypoint print by Louise Bourgeois; Relate to
your Heritage (1971), a screen print by Barbara Jones-Hogu; and Between Vertical and Horizon –
Descended Triangle No. 6 (1987), a color aquatint by Japanese artist Sho-ichi Ida. Tales of Amnesia
(the museum acquired a copy) also features in Ganesh’s vitrine; by placing her zine in the vitrine,
Ganesh flags the new narrative openings inherent to Eyes of Time.
Reflecting Muñoz’s method of queer encounter and futurity, Ganesh’s vitrine “cruises” through
the permanent collection and makes unexpected connections across visions of feminine fierceness
from multiple mythological and mythologizing traditions. Uncommitted to any particular logic,
Ganesh’s cruising disrupts conventional narratives that exist around objects, thereby altering their
relations to one another. The objects in the vitrine become “less like [them]selves, and more like
each other” (Muñoz 2009, 66). For instance, by placing Sekhmet and Kali together, Ganesh
highlights their associations with fire, healing, and menstruation; both refer to blood, death,
destruction, and protection as feminine forms of power. Sekhmet and Kali are also often depicted
with untameable felines such as tigers and lions – connecting them to the iconography of Matangi.
At the center of the Rajasthani watercolor, the many-armed Durga is depicted riding her tiger.
160 Natasha Bissonauth

However, her lesser-known incarnation, the even fiercer Matangi, appears in the upper left corner
holding a severed head and sword.6 In the label, Ganesh draws attention to Matangi as a marginal
figure in the pantheon who is “worshipped among lower castes.”
Ganesh’s vitrine also includes a drawing by Bourgeois of fleshy and bulging eyes whose
gawking stare parodies the male gaze. In the accompanying text, Ganesh again makes her own
connections: “The third eye, as seen on Kali, has often been associated with supernatural powers
in Indian mythology and continues to appear in contemporary imagery. The act of gazing into
numerous eyes might also recall the practice of darshan.”7 Although her reading does not neces-
sarily align with Bourgeois’s intentions for the piece, Ganesh’s archival cruising generates fleeting
affinities between odd bedfellows, no longer strangers to one another. In this way, Ganesh’s
work demonstrates how the fierce feminine divine form transcends cultural borders.
In Sho-ichi Ida’s work on paper, Ganesh sees an abstract form that resonates with Kali
iconography. Vedic representations of the goddess manifest in pure geometric abstraction, or
a yantra,8 which consists of a red and black diagram of interlocking triangles, lotus petals, and
other geometric forms. The Kali yantra symbolizes shakti or female divine energy. Although
Ida meditates on modernist principles that disavow referentiality and representation, Ganesh
points to new representational possibilities by bringing together disparate epistemologies that
center abstraction. And finally, Ganesh includes the work of AfriCOBRA founding member
Barbara Jones-Hogu and the brightly colored patterned screen sheet, Relate to Your Heritage
(1971), which mythologizes black historical figures. In the label, Ganesh states that “both this
work and Eyes of Time point to the importance of the feminine form in linking a collective
mythic history to present-day autonomy and power.” Hogu’s bright and kitschy psychedelic
poster art draws her audience in as an easily recognizable and pervasive aesthetic; with this
investment in the popular, the artist’s political message of black self-determination is rendered
more legible to a broader audience.9
Ganesh is able to envision such a vitrine and generate unforeseen connections because of the
Brooklyn Museum’s encyclopedic collection. Nevertheless, the museum operates at least partially,
like so many others of its kind, as “an ideological institution that produces and sustains political and
social formations” (González 2008, 66). While it was one of the first institutions in the country to
collect non-Western objects for their aesthetic (versus ethnographic) value, its archive is organized
around region-specific genealogies grounded in colonial formations of geography and history. As a
result, the unexpected but rich connections across cultures and time periods seen in Ganesh’s
vitrine are uncommon. As Ganesh “cruises the field of the visual” (Muñoz 2009, 18), her vitrine’s
narrative steps out of time – the oppressive linearity of colonial time, more specifically. In an
unprecedented fashion, she calls upon the past and makes something of it. Ganesh engenders not-
so-strange affinities – each a noncommittal connection across time and space that, regardless
of how cursory, “promises a future” with a logic different than the past (Muñoz 2009, 6).
Such “anticipatory illumination” makes it almost impossible to return to the conventional
logics structuring museological display – almost (18). As is often the case with temporary
displays, the immediate impact is fleeting – but, as I elaborate in the coda to this chapter,
how such interventions leave a mark is an open question.
An equally temporary component of Eyes of Time is the large mural that accompanies Ganesh’s
vitrine in the Herstory Gallery. Ganesh takes Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, destruction, and
renewal as the basis for her huge, mixed-media mural and reimagines goddess iconography
through a speculative aesthetic that is racialized and feminine in form.10 Distinct from anthro-
pological accounts of the deity, the mural draws on the abstracted, philosophical idea of Kali that
 Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters 161

describes her as an embodiment of cyclic time. As such, Ganesh’s vision of the goddess is not
singular. Bypassing the conventional markers of time (present, past, and future), Ganesh’s mural
gives form to three temporalities in an alternate relationship to one another: the present,
mythological time, and a future-oriented embodiment of time.11
First, viewers see the figure representing the present, which Saisha Grayson, the project’s
curator, describes as a self-portrait. This painted outline of the artist’s face depicts her
holding a black, jagged patch over her eye, obscuring it from view. Ganesh adds glitter to
the black paint, creating a scintillating and immaterial effect. The twinkling patch resembles
a galactic black portal, implying that the artist’s perspective is a meta-gaze. One eye is open,
grounded in the here and now; the other eye is obscured, yet has the capacity to see into
(and thus the potential to be copresent with) parallel universes that are still unknown.
Next, Ganesh presents mythological time. At the center of the mural, she boldly reimagines
versions of Kali recognizable to worshippers throughout Asia and the Asian diaspora. Kali’s
unkempt hair, bright blue skin, and skirt of arms recall a long tradition of religious icono-
graphy. However, by replacing Kali’s iconic head12 with Grand Central Station’s golden
clock and by painting her triple-breasted and with three legs, Ganesh renders the goddess
unfamiliar. Ganesh’s Kali is newly mutated and technologized. Finally, on the opposite end
of the mural, Ganesh offers future-oriented time, combining the human and technological
in a face profile, which is partly three-dimensional through the use of custom gears
resembling the internal structure of a mechanical clock.
The location of the mural deepens its connection to and interrogation of traditional ico-
nography. According to Grayson, exhibitions in the Herstory Gallery are mandated to dia-
logue with Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979), installed permanently in an adjacent
space. The famous second-wave feminist artwork is comprised of a triangular table with
thirty-nine porcelain plates (thirteen along each equilateral side) sculpted into stylized vaginas.
At each setting is the name of a historical or mythological female figure, such as Ishtar,
Artemisia Gentileschi, Virginia Woolf, and of course Kali. Yet, upon contemplating the
latter, Ganesh wondered: if the fierce goddess had, in fact, attended Chicago’s hypothetical
dinner party, would Kali have eaten with the knife and fork provided? Would she fold to the
pressures of assimilating and adopt a culturally specific way of eating, or would she insist on
using her hands? Extending this logic, what would she eat? These questions illuminate how
The Dinner Party is limited by the Eurocentricism of second-wave consciousness (Ganesh and
Grayson 2015). Although The Dinner Party aims to reclaim the past in order to build another
kind of future, the artwork restricts most of its non-Western characters to prehistory by
understanding mythological time as linear.
And so, while the exhibitors in the gallery are mandated to dialogue with Chicago’s work,
Ganesh does so only minimally, partly because of her interest in bringing a feminist gaze to
more than one work in the permanent collection. Placing the mural in direct proximity with
the mythological objects in the vitrine, Ganesh deepens the encounter between her work
and the permanent collection. In Svati Shah’s words, Ganesh asks her audience to “consider
the histories of myth within the figures that populate her images, as well as, the histories of
mythmaking that structure the narrative of the canon itself. If the story of the art historical
record is that of categorizing the canon into the knowable forms and places of the ‘universal’
Western canon, under which emergent categories such as feminist, queer, or Asian art are
produced and assimilated, then Ganesh’s work abstracts this narrative, pulls it apart, and looks
intently for what remains” (2011, 126).
162 Natasha Bissonauth

As such, myth is not only a source of content for Ganesh; it also comprises a mode of
critique. She ultimately proposes a radical archival rethinking by ushering in a vision for
display not yet on the horizon.

The Scorpion Gesture (2018)

In a more recent museum project, Ganesh also interacts with a permanent collection through a
speculative aesthetic. In The Scorpion Gesture at the Rubin Museum (February 23, 2018–January 9,
2019), she engages with mythological objects representing the feminine, but this time, her tem-
porary interventions take on digital form. Silhouette in the Graveyard,13 one of her new animations,
opens theatrically with a set of dancing curtains made of skeleton bones that quickly lift to reveal
an underlying drama. As the work progresses, more skeletons fall, this time toward a hellish scene
where waves, red like blood, carry ghoulish monsters, scavenging beasts, and tortured bodies to
places unknown. Out of the sparkling, galactic skies emerges a triple-breasted pink silhouette.
First, she appears cross-legged with her faceless head in flames, and as she slowly stands, the camera
zooms into her torso, which projects apocalyptic scenes of the present. Crowds protesting the
occupation of Palestine and other conflicts in the Middle East that have been funded by the West
flash before the viewer’s eyes. Also projected are images of the Women’s March, migrants
jumping ship, Rohingya women and children fleeing Buddhist supremacy, and posters stating
Black Lives Matter and I Can’t Breathe. All are superimposed on climate disasters such as forest fires,
volcanic ash, melting icebergs, and torrential rain. At the close of the animation, the skeletons have
the last dance as a grim line of skulls whirls in a creepy and cryptic race to the bottom.
As with her other interventions, these animations are not displayed in a dedicated gallery. They
are situated among works on permanent display, which mostly consist of manuscripts, paintings,
sculptures, and other objects up to fifteen hundred years old depicting Hindu and Buddhist
mythology. However, Ganesh’s speculative aesthetic does not simply exist alongside the Rubin’s
mythological representations. It encounters them, engendering dialogue across temporalities and
through fantastical forms. Silhouette in the Graveyard’s display is particularly distinct; projected on the
wall behind a late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century Mongolian sculpture, this animation
appears as a looming shadow over the permanent collection. In an accompanying text regarding
the sculpture, Ganesh remarks, “Maitreya is the Future Buddha, whose prophetic arrival is said to
usher in a new age at a time when the terrestrial world has lost its way. The endless stream of
images of political, social, and ecological upheaval that we are bombarded with daily seemed in
uncanny alignment with the apocalyptic moment associated with Maitreya.” As in Eyes of Time,
Ganesh’s intentional juxtapositions show how aesthetic objects from different eras reflect new
meaning onto one another. Here, she pulls from the past, not only examples of feminine
form, but of prophetic fierceness as well, as a way to speak to the precarity of our time. She
seeks future-oriented models and perhaps also another kind of present.
Ganesh’s other formal experiments with animation in The Scorpion Gesture reveal her
methodologies for depicting temporal and spatial dislocations. Working with an animation
studio, she enhances her drawings using multiple camera angles, zooming, and other techni-
cal manipulations.14 For example, The Messenger15 opens with a mandala that arguably func-
tions as a point of entry for the entire show. Many other objects in the Rubin Museum tell
complex stories with multiple levels of imagery; however, these layers are rendered on a
single pictorial plane. Through animation technology, Ganesh translates the visual depth and
dimensionality inherent to the objects in the permanent collection, allowing the viewer to
 Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters 163

enter her image’s time-space in visceral ways. Her aesthetic methodology is akin to moving
through a wormhole – that quintessential speculative trope.
Overarching preoccupations in The Messenger, such as its layered imagery, cyclic narrative struc-
ture, and bodily transformations, recur throughout the animation series. Consistent with Ganesh’s
other digital animations in the show, Rainbow Body, Adventures of the White Beryl, and Metropolis16
respond directly to nearby objects from the permanent collection. In the show’s press material, the
artist notes how “Rainbow Body takes inspiration from the cave on the right in the painting of the
bodhisattva Maitreya, located adjacent to the animation. The cave structure is elaborated upon and
extensively built out, introducing an interior depth where the ultimate transformation happens.”17
Likewise, Adventures of the White Beryl features a shapeshifting protagonist as a way to speak to the
various stages of life described in a multi-leaf manuscript in a neighboring gallery. As the character
can never be stopped, pinned down, or defined, the constant transformations bring to the surface a
speculative potential inherent to the original manuscript. This particular work also indexes various
media, including early stop-motion animation, vintage comics, and early video game aesthetics,
thereby gesturing toward an alternative history of art.
Metropolis is likely Ganesh’s most ambitious production within this series, referencing not
only the nearby painting Life Scenes of Master Shantarakshita and other bronze sculptures of the
prophet Maitreya, but also the Soviet silent film, Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924), and Fritz
Lang’s 1927 science fiction film Metropolis. By appropriating these predecessors, Ganesh
envisions science fiction as inextricably linked to myth. Throughout Ganesh’s work, scenes of
imbricated environments and cityscapes recall the dystopic worlds of Octavia Butler and
Manjula Padmanabhan, characterized by class divides, destructive imperial ambitions, and
inequitable access to resources.
Finally, connecting back to Silhouette in the Graveyard, Rainbow Body and Metropolis embody a
prophetic vision. In Rainbow Body, viewers are transported through a dreamlike journey to witness
the tantric and transcendent union of Padmasambhava (the Second Buddha) with Mandarava, a
dakini.18 In contrast, Metropolis culminates with the dramatic resurrection of Ganesh’s speculative
version of Maitreya. Why does Ganesh exhume these particular mythological narratives that
center upon the feminine form and reimagine them through an ethnofuturist aesthetic? Myth
and science fiction, or the speculative more broadly, offer powerful metaphors for the human
condition, asking what makes us distinctly human (and not spirit, demon, animal, or robot, for
example). Science fiction also rubs against the teleological nature of history, even as it explores
what it means to be embodied in the high-tech world of the present and potential future. As a
fantastical device, science fiction exposes “real-world” sociopolitical aspirations and fears that insti-
gate the desire for alternate worlds. When disarmed of its imperialist visions, science fiction has the
capacity to mobilize its fabulatory heuristic to imagine a world otherwise, making reimagining a
form of social critique and critical realism. Centering speculative feminine fierceness, Ganesh’s
mythographies highlight the urgency of these stakes for survival – stakes in much sharper focus
now, given the rise of global fascism, right-wing populism, and religious fundamentalism.

Coda: Notes on ephemera

From Tales of Amnesia onwards, new possibilities for narratives that center on fierce brown
femmes form the heart of Ganesh’s art. Through Eyes of Time and The Scorpion Gesture, she
targets museological display. Her practice reveals the restrictive architecture of storytelling
while reformatting it in a disidentificatory way. If anything, she is committed to a contingent
164 Natasha Bissonauth

logic of narratives: hers have no beginning or end, just long, extenuated middles. And yet,
the immediate impact of Eyes of Time and The Scorpion Gesture is neither long nor enduring.
Instead, these two museum projects are fleeting, temporary interventions within permanent
structures. This ephemeral materiality of Eyes of Time and The Scorpion Gesture is integral to
the way each project dares to imagine otherwise. If even only for a moment, they envision
another future for the feminine form in museological display. Drawing on a long tradition of
feminist and queer thought and tactics, Muñoz makes a case for ephemera as queer evidence,
which may not count as everlasting, but lives “as an ephemeral happening that we remem-
ber” (2009, 70). By now, Ganesh’s site-specific mural has been painted over, and the digital
projections have faded from view – but their traces remain, if not in the archives of either
museum, then in visitors’ memories. Perhaps these traces were meant to slip away; if left to
the institutions, such interventions would be appropriated and come to reify difference yet
again. Instead, these ephemeral projects disrupt institutional permanence and as such function
as institutional critique. Ganesh’s tactic of mobilizing ephemera enacts a foundational rubric
within women of color thought: rejecting the master’s tools and refusing to rebuild the
master’s house. Ironically though, the museums themselves invited Ganesh to create her
temporary interventions, begging the question, why? As gestures, might Eyes of Time and
The Scorpion Gesture open institutions to a capaciousness they desire but cannot sustain? As
gesture, Ganesh’s projects linger, but as speculation they have yet to come.

Notes
1 A shorter version of parts of this chapter previously appeared online. “A Prophetic Vision that Dares
to Imagine Otherwise” was uploaded to the Indian arts site Critical Collective on June 19, 2018 (http
s://www.chitraganesh.com/portfolio/critical-collective-natasha-bissonauth-summer-2018/). I am
grateful for permission to include some of the material in this book.
2 In this chapter, I intentionally use the term feminine form as opposed to, say, feminist representation. I am
working with a vast, global set of objects, and the latter term would flatten multiple feminist epis-
temologies across time and space. Since I analyze fantastical figures, as opposed to live, human ones, I
also prefer not use a biological term, such as female. Most of all, Ganesh uses a science fiction aesthetic to
reimagine feminine power. In consequence, I am invested in the shifting notion of the feminine as a
politics of form, which I mobilize in a feminist critique of objects on display in museums.
3 There is a vast body of critical writing on race, gender, and science fiction, including but not lim-
ited to Suvin (1979); Haraway (1991); Dery (1993); Schueller (2005); Jackson and Moody-Freeman
(2011); Lavender (2011, 2014, 2017).
4 The decolonial potential of speculative imagination is in some ways ironic given the roots of science
fiction. The nineteenth-century period of the most fervid European imperialist expansion coincides
exactly with the rise of the genre. Since its early days as pulp literature, science fiction has alternately
romanticized and demonized the imaginary Orient, while its dreams of space travel may be seen as a
continuation of the settler imaginary. The opportunity to dissect how science fiction’s narratives of
otherness, otherworldiness, and alienation reflect systemic social injustices tied to histories of empire
has often been missed. Yet black, brown, queer of color, and women of color fiction writers and
theorists have reimagined the genre. Tapping into the inherent emancipatory potential of speculative
imagination, they continue to expand the genre (Kilgore 2003; Rieder 2008).
5 If the nationalist fantasy of ACK is itself a kind of historical amnesia, then Tales of Amnesia calls out
this privilege of “forgetting” to know otherwise – the willful amnesia of Hindu fundamentalist
retellings of history and myth.
6 Both versions of the goddess, Durga and Matangi, represent some of the fiercer forms of feminine
divinity. Her multiple representation in a single work of art points to the goddess’s inherent plurality,
another feature which renders her terrifying.
7 Darshan refers to seeing and being seen by the deity and its representations.
 Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters 165

8 Yantras are spiritual visualization instruments specific to the philosophy and ritual of Tantra, an
esoteric sect of Hinduism and Buddhism.
9 For images of objects in Ganesh’s vitrine, visit https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/
chitra_ganesh/. For a discussion of another use of a vitrine and disparate objects to queer a museum,
see chapter 6 in this book.
10 Afrofuturist cultural productions take the lead in carving out a space within the speculative tradition
where main characters and plotlines empower gendered and racialized protagonists and narratives
(Jackson and Moody-Freeman 2011; Womack 2013). For example, the alien spaceship is often
aligned with concepts of mother Africa (Eglash 2002). Significantly, the first known example of
South Asian science fiction is Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), a feminist story set in a world
without men.
11 Readers may wish to consult the online version of this artwork: http://www.chitraganesh.com/p
ortfolio/eyes-of-time/.
12 In religious iconography, Kali’s tongue hangs from her mouth. She is also often shown in a state of
ecstasy while defeating her most recent demonic enemy; a garland of severed heads illustrates the
fate of her opponents.
13 This work may be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHnMPTIkwLY.
14 For an earlier example of Ganesh using the moving image and digital animation, see Rabbithole (2010).
15 This work may be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AqM7zjN-G8.
16 Rainbow Body can be seen at https://vimeo.com/267294128; Adventures of the White Beryl at https://
vimeo.com/267295370; and Metropolis at https://vimeo.com/267296079.
17 Press material from The Scorpion Gesture, the Rubin Museum, 2018.
18 In Buddhist philosophy, a dakini is an archetype of spiritual enlightenment in feminine form.

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Rose.” South Atlantic Quarterly 92(4): 735–778.
Eglash, Ron. 2002. “Race, Sex, and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text
20(2): 49–64.
Ganesh, Chitra, and Saisha Grayson. 2015. “Artist and Curator Talk: Eyes of Time.” March 26. New
York: Brooklyn Museum.
González, Jennifer. 2008. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Grayson, Saisha. 2012. “Breathing Between the Lines: Re-Deconstruction in Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of
Amnesia.” n.paradoxa: International Journal of Feminist Art 29: 49–57.
Halberstam, J. Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, by Donna Haraway,
149–181. New York: Routledge.
Hossain, Royeka Sakhawat. 1988 (1905). Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The
Secluded Ones. Reprint. New York: The Feminist Press.
Jackson, Sandra, and Julie E. Moody-Freeman, eds. 2011. The Black Imagination, Science Fiction and the
Speculative. London: Routledge.
Kilgore, W.D. 2003. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Lavender, Isiah. 2011. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lavender, Isiah, ed. 2014. Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi.
Lavender, Isiah, ed. 2017. Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
166 Natasha Bissonauth

Lothian, Alexis. 2018. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. New York: New York
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Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New
York University Press.
Rieder, John. 2008. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Schueller, Malini Johar. 2005. “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color
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Shah, Svati. 2011. “Knowing ‘The Unknowns’: The Artwork of Chitra Ganesh.” Feminist Studies
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Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New
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Womack, Ytasha. 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago, IL: Lawrence
Hill Books.
14
NONBINARY DIFFERENCE:
Dionysus, Arianna, and the Fictive Arts of Museum
Photography

Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

This collaborative chapter explores a pair of museum photographs depicting the same marble
sculpture: a Roman copy of a Greek fourth-century BCE bust of Dionysus, housed at the
Capitoline Museums in Rome.1 The first photograph is an anonymous twentieth-century
reproduction – with Arianna printed underneath, crossed out with ballpoint – found by Åsa
Johannesson in the Eugenie Strong Collection at the British School at Rome archive (Figure
14.1). The second is a photograph of the bust made by Johannesson in 2017, taken in response to
the archival image (Figure 14.2). As nonbinary trans people doing artistic research through
practice, we explore the assemblage of associations and resonances generated by these images to
articulate relations among photography, labeling, gender, museums, and archives. We aim to
display complexity and connectivity, rather than to draw firm conclusions. Following Barad
(2007, 35), we refer to our approach as a material-discursive method. The interconnections in
museum collections – links formed between things2 by classification and labeling, by grouping
and arrangement, by histories and myths – are simultaneously semiotic and material. Mislabeling
has material consequences and leaves traces; myths, too, may have tangible effects. These links
cannot be reduced to the zero-sum fields of true/false or object/label; instead, they suggest a
fictive, contingent mode.3 With this chapter, we are not aiming to discover forgotten truths, nor
to place or displace entities within established or novel forms of categorization. Instead, we
sketch one method of exploring networks of association in museums to demonstrate the com-
plex and paradoxical operations of what we label nonbinary difference: a generative potential that
foregrounds instabilities, rather than a given identity to be represented.
At stake are simultaneous political, personal, and philosophical problematics of nonbinary trans
identities, both in the museum and its wider context. Artistic research through practice has the
potential to articulate the complexities inherent in nonbinary difference; it can address what K. J.
Rawson terms the “politics of absence” of trans experiences and thematics in museums and
archives: “In some cases, absence is a result of misreadings of existing materials, while in other cases,
there is a complete vacancy in the historical record” (2015, 457). This absence of trans representa-
tion is one of many significant omissions, ongoing patterns of exclusion and revision amounting to
a structural politics, a “gendered exclusion and silencing” (Hartal 2016, 91). We emphasize these
glitches in institutional narratives, not only those implied by museums’ systems of framing and
168 Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

labeling, but extending to wider political and cultural contexts. This speaks to the meaning making
inherent in “anti-identitarian” nonbinary identities, forms of difference that struggle to free them-
selves from long-established, dualistic labels dividing male and female, research and practice, origi-
nal and reproduction, presence and absence. We propose that a nonbinary trans research style or set
of concerns can generate sensitivity to difference. This could have significant consequences for the
contemporary emphasis on representing gender identities in museums and archives. Our focus is not on
representing a given nonbinary identity: representation is predicated on precisely those dualisms we
reject. Instead, we focus on the generation of nonbinary difference, paying attention to
material-discursive networks that unsettle stable identities and categories.

Nonbinary and trans identities in classical museum collections

There is a semantic glitch in the label nonbinary, highlighting its paradoxical sense of negation.
In marking the division between binary/nonbinary, nonbinary ironically re-inscribes binaries
in the very act of resisting them. But rather than negating nonbinary trans identities – and
hence the lived experience of the two authors – this glitch reveals what feminist theorist Val

FIGURE 14.1 Arianna (Sculptura Antica), n.d. Photographer unknown

Source: Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini. Photographic Archive of the Musei Capitolini,
Rome. © Roma, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali. Image re-photographed by Åsa
Johannesson.
 Nonbinary Difference 169

FIGURE 14.2Dionysus and Arianna

Source: Musei Capitolini, Rome, 2017. Photograph by Åsa Johannesson; original in color.

Plumwood calls “the set of interrelated and mutually reinforcing dualisms which permeate
western culture, form[ing] a fault-line which runs through its entire conceptual system”
(1993, 42).4 Even potential “escape routes” from dualism are “mazes containing mirrors,
sidetracks, looped trails and knots” (60). Paradoxes are systemic here; they go with the territory.
Both within and without museums and archives, they characterize the material-discursive
embodiments of nonbinary identities. In this essay, we explore one such (k)not of embodiment,
comprising museum artifact, archival document, contemporary artwork, and a set of transtem-
poral, transcultural reference points or associations. Plumwood’s “fault-line” runs through
everything involved. Copies, cross-dressing, crossings-out, masks, mislabeling, myths, photo-
graphs, and sculptures are phenomena that seem poised at the brink of categorical divisions
between masculine/feminine, presence/absence, original/reproduction, history/myth, and true/
false. To propose nonbinary difference, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze on “difference in
itself,” distinct from identities and their negatives (1994, 28–70). Just as female experiences
cannot be reduced to the not-male, nonbinary trans experiences cannot be reduced to not-male
and/or not-female. In (re)searching nonbinary trans thematics in museum collections, we are
looking for a generative difference, for material-discursive things that refuse to resolve themselves
in established dualistic patterns.
170 Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

For Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, “it is no coincidence that ‘transgender’ as a con-
cept … rose to prominence at the same moment as the archival turn in the 1990s and sig-
naled similar premillennial and postmodern anxieties regarding the collapse of time and
place” (2015, 540). This “collapse” could equally be described as an explosion of networked
copresence: intense, contingent relationships between things from different times and places.
Museums and archives have become especially important because they exemplify our sense
that relevance cannot be measured in years or miles. Like the recent discovery that rust-
colored snow on Eastern European mountains was caused by dust from the Sahara, deposited
via interacting weather patterns (Samenow 2018), connectivity can be predicted only by
observing networks of material association. Liberated from “the apparent seriousness of
metonymical contexts, like the chronological and the geographical,” which according to some
philosophers, are boundaries with “no epistemological basis” (Agamben 2002), experiences in
the post-Foucauldian museum are particularly resonant for trans sensitivities.5 As a rare demo-
graphic, estimated at under 1 percent of most populations – although increasingly visible in the
most varied cultural and historical locations – trans people may experience intensities of kin-
ship, recognition, and understanding in museums and archives that are not present in their daily
lives. This makes the “politics of absence” of trans themes and figures in museums – systemic
erasures of gender complexity and nonconformity – all the more troubling.
Classical mythology is one area of European culture where trans thematics of gender
transformation and fluidity are undeniably present. Some classical narratives of transforma-
tion resonate with transitions from one binary gender role to another. The fourth century
BCE Phigaleian Frieze on display at the British Museum (BM), for example, depicts a tribe
of centaurs burying Kaineus. Kaineus is singled out for this treatment because, to use a
contemporary label, he is a trans man. Latreus, the centaurs’ champion, realizes that Kai-
neus was born female and mocks him for it but then fails to best Kaineus in single combat.
Outraged, the centaurs bury Kaineus with rocks (or in some versions, tree trunks). The
gender transformation that is key to this narrative is present in the museum’s printed label,
but entirely missing from the online catalogue entry.6 Furthermore, the frieze cannot be found
by searching the catalogue for gender, transgender, or trans; no classical artifacts – or any other
European objects – feature on the BM “gender identity” webpage (British Museum 2017).
Despite many trips to the BM and some familiarity with its collections, we learned of this frieze
thanks to trans culture online: photographs of the artifact and label were posted on Twitter and
discussed on Reddit (Trotman 2016). Similar trans artifacts are surprisingly widespread, but
discovering them requires foreknowledge of their existence, awareness of which mythological
figures to seek, chance encounters, or – as in this case – online crowdsourcing. The increasingly
powerful development of the internet as grassroots trans archive has the potential to alter public
and scholarly engagement with museums and archives radically.
Other classical narratives resonate with nonbinary experience. Dionysus is a mythological
character with resonance for contemporary trans and nonbinary communities online and in
museums. Narratives, objects, and performances associated with this complex figure have been
reproduced and reinterpreted from the first millennium BCE to the present. Dionysus features
prominently in many internet community resources about the history of trans experience but is
absent from the results for trans* and gender searches of the BM online catalogue.7 Gestated in
Semele’s (or Persephone’s) womb and again in Zeus’s thigh, “twice-born Dionysus” was born
male but in many versions raised as a girl, often presenting as or mistaken for female. Described
by Aeschylus as “man-womanish” or “the womanly one” (Monick 1987, 86), and by Euripides
 Nonbinary Difference 171

as “shaped like a girl,” Dionysus “freely crosses gender boundaries,” and is regularly described or
depicted with long hair, in “kroko-tos, ‘party dress,’ and mitra, ‘headband,’ clothing normally worn
by females” (Cole 2010, 327–328). Cross-dressing is a key feature of Dionysian rituals and fes-
tivities (Bullough and Bullough 1993, 28). Due to these qualities and others, Cole titles her
introductory section on Dionysus “Paradoxes.” In (re)searching museums and archives for
nonbinary trans thematics, Dionysus is a productive keyword.

Museum photography and the production of difference (ÅJ8)

In 2016, I undertook the University of the Arts London Mead residency at the British School at
Rome (BSR) in order to study the relationships between photographic portraiture and figurative
sculpture in the context of nonbinary gender. While my photographs depicted persons who felt
their gender did not align with the binary categories of male or female, my research centered on
formal aspects: shapes, texture, framing, light, and shadow. I was interested in how these mate-
rial-discursive elements are involved in the production of gender in portraiture, and how they
might be used to generate nonbinary difference. These explorations led me to classical sculpture.
I was drawn to classical sculpture’s interlinked contradictions: the marble statue as a carved fixity
of precision, versus the gender ambiguity and fluidity embedded within the Roman and Greek
myths of the Amazons, Hermaphroditus, and particularly Dionysus.
For my residency, I proposed to investigate representations of gender through pose and ges-
ture in Roman sculpture by photographing a selection of museum busts and statues. However,
after discovering a large collection of early twentieth-century photographs of classical sculpture, I
found myself spending increasing amounts of time in the BSR photography archive. I was taken
by the beauty of these images once produced to catalogue museum collections that are now,
nearly a hundred years later, something more than the visual documentation of objects. For me,
they were things, artistic creations in their own right. I came across a photograph that made me
pause: a marble bust with large eyes and long hair. Like most other prints, it was black and white,
slightly sun damaged. The paper was thin; it was a cheap reproduction of a photograph from a
printing press technique, rather than darkroom printing using the negative. This bust exhibited a
tiny, careful mouth with a small crack, resembling a cleft upper lip. The eyes were not subtly
carved like those I had studied in museums, but dark holes in the sculpture. The caption
underneath read: Roma Museo Capitolino Arianna (Sculptura Antica).
To me as a photographer, this was a strong image, producing emotional resonance despite the
fact that I knew little about it. What made me stop and glance again, however, was not the
image itself. Within the caption, the name Arianna – the Roman form of the Greek Ariadne –
had been scribbled out with a ballpoint pen, so it read Arianna. I recognized this sculpture. I had
seen it during a visit to the Capitoline Museums’ Palazzo Nuovo while mapping the Dionysus
statues in Roman museums. Consulting my notes, I found the bust was labeled: Dionysos, Albani
Collection, Inventory #MC 717. From an original of the 4th century BC. Like the marble bust in the
Arianna photograph, it had long hair and an angular face, without a pronounced jaw. Framed
with the label Arianna, these features led to reading the piece as a female bust. Captioned Dio-
nysus, however, the features suggested a gender expression that failed to pass neatly as male or
female. The assemblage of bust, photograph, and labeling generated nonbinary difference.
In 2017, I revisited the Palazzo Nuovo to photograph this bust labeled both Arianna and
Dionysus. The Capitoline Museum label stated this bust was a copy, the notion of copy
operating within different parameters than photograph as copy – a Roman copy of a lost Greek
172 Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

original, itself made to depict an allegorical figure that had no original. In this way, both busts
are approximations (ad-proximus) and appropriations (ad-proprius). For postmodernist theorist
and art historian Craig Owen, “the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them.
He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter … the image becomes
something other (allos = other + agoreuei = to speak). He does not restore the original
meaning that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather, he adds
another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the
allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one (1998, 317).
Similarly, my photograph would become a method of artistic research, an act of appropriation
of allegorical imagery, declaring a self-consciousness not necessarily present in the photograph as
copy. My reason for executing this photograph was rooted in my fascination with the bust and
the Arianna photograph, a museum object and its archival record. I had a hunch of what I was
after, a grasping without a defined outcome. I also felt an expectation to re-produce both the
bust and the archival photograph. This is inherently a photographer’s burden: knowledge that
the ability to generate resemblance or sameness is rewarded more than the production of alterity.
Nevertheless, I aimed to generate something new; the photograph that I produced would not
only be an appropriation of the bust in front of me, but also of the Arianna photograph. My
engagement with both bust and photograph co-opted the Arianna image into serving as art as
well, a layered appropriative gesture with material-discursive effects.
Both the photograph and the statue come from acts of re-production. However, while the
photograph is traditionally expected to exist in a binary opposition of copy/original, the
classical sculpture is more evidently intertwined with fictive connections. As a museum object,
the Roman bust encompasses a twofold ambiguity: first, in its supposed portrayal of a
mythical figure; and second, as an appropriation of an “original” Greek bust for which we
have no other material record. In this way, despite being named a copy by the museum, the
bust declares an entanglement of materiality, authorship, and origin. In light of this ontolo-
gical discrepancy between bust and photograph, what are the potentialities for understanding
the photograph as a fictive form of alterity, outside established definitions of original/copy?
In 1917, artist Lucy Schwob adopted the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun. In works
like Que me veux-tu? (or What Do You Want from Me? 1929), Cahun confronted the dominant
parameters of photography (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2018). Through a double exposure of
Cahun’s own shaved head from two angles in one image, this photograph came to operate
outside the expectations of both gender and photography. Que me veux-tu? foregrounds photo-
graphic production, resisting the illusion that meaning-making takes place solely through the
original/copy binary. We are not simply confronted with a reproduction of an ambiguously
gendered person but are encouraged to acknowledge the photograph as a fictive creation,
generated through nonlinear material-discursive networks.9
Foucault (2002) argues that subjects do not exist prior to discourse but are produced by dis-
course, and difference is constituted by discourse as well. Discourse is not merely an abstract
linguistic or semiotic condition but entails an “associated field” and complex “materiality” (129).
Karen Barad explains Donna Haraway’s discursive formation of difference as “critical difference
within,” insisting that we focus on the matter involved in its production (2007, 72). In the Arianna
image, the unnamed photographer worked with the gendered conventions of photographic
portraiture to frame the bust as Arianna, depicting a fictive femininity now radically reframed by
the shift in institutional interpretation. The discourse of museum photography does not merely
reproduce or represent (copy) pre-existing subjects, or even pre-existing difference. In Cahun’s
 Nonbinary Difference 173

work and the Arianna photograph, these images-with-labels generate nonbinary difference: dif-
ference that does not collapse back into prior categories, but foregrounds glitchy systems of
institutional framing and labeling grounded in dualism.
Responding to this nonbinary difference, I loaded my camera with color film while
shooting at the Capitoline Museum, fearing too close a resemblance to the black and white
Arianna. I arranged the composition from another vantage point, approaching the bust from
the left rather than the right, from below rather than above, and from a greater distance. My
aim was to refuse the viewer the possibility of experiencing the two photographs in a simple
compare-and-contrast mode. Together, the bust, the Arianna photograph, and the photo-
graph I produced form a complex material-discursive assemblage through their subjects, their
implicitly gendered labels, and their institutional contexts. They generate a difference that is
not quantifiable. Rather than representing or reproducing the depicted object, they operate
through the materialities embedded within photographic production: two-dimensionality,
framing, contrast, and greyscale or color palette. The photograph is unfixed from gaining
value solely through representing difference as identity, a material-discursive move that
displaces it from the categorizable. Difference in photography becomes agential.10

The fictive arts of museum photography (CLC)

When first looking at this pair of photographs, which still unsettle me when I consider they
depict the same sculpture, I was reminded of Japanese Noh masks. Not only are the eyes of
the sculpture cut more like holes than sculpted features, the bust becoming a mask, but the
face itself seems different in the two photographs. Certain Noh masks are made so that a
change in orientation brings about a profound shift in expression, moving from joy to
anguish. Evidence suggests that Dionysian theater masks worked similarly.11 But in this
instance, the difference is not only in emotional expression but in the subject’s gender, if
not sex. The first image (Figure 14.1), taken of the right side of the bust from below the
eye line, I read as masculine. With parted lips and focused gaze, the figure seems to be
speaking with a passionate, dominant intensity; the jaw, nose, and brow are accentuated. In
the second image (Figure 14.2), taken of the left side of the bust from above the eye line
almost a century earlier, these qualities are reversed, emphasizing a stereotypical femininity.
The mouth appears closed, and the expression is one of quiet thoughtfulness; the gaze is
softly averted, the throat slightly bared. The shoulders and even the hairline seem different
in these twinned images. Never having seen the sculpture that is their subject, I feel as if I
know it and would recognize it at once, but remain unsure of what I would see. Would
the sculpture appear as a masculine-female or feminine-male, or as some neutral androgyny? Or
another kind of nonbinary state entirely, retaining its double aspect, a glitchy ambi-valence,
generating perceptual gender shifts in passing, resisting dualism?
Just what are we looking at here? A tangled assemblage, more suited to network diagram
than linear writing (Figure 14.3): a contemporary photograph, taken in response to an
archival reproduction of an early twentieth-century reproduction of a Roman reproduction
of a Greek carving from two and a half millennia ago, itself a reproduction of a con-
ventionalized subject, a well-worn allegorical theme. Responding to the name Arianna
“under erasure” – borrowing Gayatri Spivak’s translation of sous rature, Jacques Derrida’s own
borrowing from Martin Heidegger12 – Johannesson’s photographs appropriate the unstable
institutional-historical perception of gender in this ancient sculpture. The sculpture(s), the
FIGURE 14.3 Dionysus and Arianna, 2018
Source: Diagram by Clair Le Couteur.
 Nonbinary Difference 175

mythological subjects and resonances, the historical and contemporary institutional discourses,
and the attendant museum photographs are transformed; all become entangled, implicated, or
appropriated as artwork.
This gender instability persists elsewhere, too. One contemporary commercial reproduc-
tion, made from an early nineteenth-century plaster cast taken by Bertel Thorvaldsen of a
similar bust in the Capitoline collections, perhaps even the one depicted as Arianna, is
advertised online by Giust Gallery under the title Ariadne. The description states: “The ori-
ginal bust is a Roman marble copy of a Greek original. It may very well not be a portrait of
Ariadne but of her lover, Bacchus (Roman)/Dionysus (Greek)” (2018). The image advertis-
ing this resin reduction intensifies the framing choices in Arianna; it is taken from the left
side, above the eye line, exaggerating the averted gaze of the bust and making the mouth
appear closed. In its photograph, Thorvaldsens Museum uses a more frontal framing and titles
the sculpture Bacchus, although it notes that “at the time of Ropp’s commission, the bust was
regarded as an Ariadne” (Thorvaldsens Museum 2016).
Museum photography is never a simple matter of reproduction, cataloguing, or documenta-
tion. Writing about his Musée Imaginaire (1935–1947), a “museum without walls” of hundreds of
black and white documentary images from collections around the world, André Malraux
observed that museum photography produced “fictitious arts” where “the fragment is king”
(1974, 24). Careful lighting and framing, reduction to high-contrast monochrome, and the
resulting homogenization of scale and material conspire to “impart … family likeness to objects
that have actually but slight affinity” (21). This points to a more general feature of scopic regimes in
institutional collecting and display.13 The generative power of typology makes it an unstable
method, which acts to “reconfigure the space, to redistribute it, to disorient it at last: to displace it
where we thought that it was continuous, re-gather it when we assumed there were borders”
(Didi-Huberman, quoted and translated by Huapaya 2016, 112). Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire
found a precursor in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929), a collection of thousands of
art-historical photographic reproductions. Warburg arranged these allegorical images in con-
stellations on boards to demonstrate what he considered transcultural, transhistorical psychic
processes. Warburg’s transdisciplinary associative method is receiving renewed interest, particu-
larly in the emerging field of artistic research through practice.14 Philosopher Georges Didi-
Huberman comments on the power of Warburg’s shifting constellations to become “forms that
think” (2010, 181). Whether in Warburg’s or Malraux’s very different projects, in the typological
groupings of the traditional European ethnographic museum, or in the Capitoline Museums’
displays, acts of spatial juxtaposition are never neutral. Scopic regimes produce seemingly reliable
similarities and differences through visual analogy, generating appropriative effects that bring
fictive affinities and associations into being.
The many theoretical, artistic, and institutional projects of typological collecting demonstrate
the power of reframing and montage to produce powerful “forms that think,” agential in gen-
erating associative thought. But what Malraux labeled the “fictitious arts” of museum photo-
graphy – institutional image production, and by extension museum displays and patterns of visual
culture generally – do not generate associations merely in thought. The scopic regimes embed-
ded in contemporary culture too often demarcate all sexes, genders, and sexualities falling outside
a binary heterosexual male-masculinity and female-femininity as unnatural, inauthentic, abnor-
mal impostures.15 Rather than fictitious (false or unreal), the arts of museum photography are
better described as fictive: they generate real-world consequences. Pace Malraux, however,
rather than assembling disparate things into singular typology – an illusory homogenizing
176 Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

type or style – the fictive arts of museum photography seem in the case of Arianna to have the
opposite effect. Johannesson’s images do not so much reproduce or represent gender in their
subject matter, but rework and reveal it as a network of associations. The space of association
surrounding this network of classical sculptures, labels, and images is reconfigured and redis-
tributed, generating difference. And what is more, this difference in gender – so significant that
art historians and museum professionals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries read
the sculpture as female, as Arianna or Ariadne rather than her lover Dionysus, and that echoes of
this mislabeling persist – pertains to the sculpture’s subject. These allegorical images depict the
gender-fluid, transgressive Dionysus, a vital figure of nonbinary difference in twin contemporary
projects: recovering and restoring trans experience and expression, and revealing and redressing
the politics of absence in museums and archives.
We cannot follow established dualisms, separating originals from reproductions, myth from
history, or artwork from archival or commercial images. Not only have museum photographs
frequently been made with skill and sensibility, and so arguably with artistic intent, but also
applying our established label of fine art to classical sculpture may itself be a fictive act. Who is to
say that these marbles – whether reproductions or originals – were not produced to institutional
requirements by technicians for a commercial venture? Indeed, the formal qualities of classical
white marble and plaster, on which much museum photography relies for its material character,
are themselves part historical contingency, part Victorian invention; Greek and Roman originals
were boldly colored (Bradley 2009). While we are invested in Foucauldian attempts to “measure
the mutations that operate in general in the field of history” (Foucault 2002, 15), our task is to
question our own systems of framing and labeling, the premises and parameters of our own
methods, and the agency of forms that think. The two photographs in this chapter are not simply
subjects of research, but its methodology. Through their constitution, they manifest the method
by which they are addressed; they are museum photographs made in order not only to think
about museum photography, but also to influence it.

A collecting in place of a conclusion: Nonbinary difference

In this chapter, we have sketch-mapped complex associations generated by the seemingly
simple act of photographing a classical bust in a museum. We demonstrate the potential of
Johannesson’s photograph, the Arianna image, the bust itself, the figure of Dionysus, and Le
Couteur’s diagram to generate nonbinary difference as a material-discursive assemblage. In
the dual context of artistic research through practice and nonbinary trans experience,
informed by notions of difference and the fictive, we have attempted to address the “politics
of absence” of trans thematics in museums and archives. Institutional uncertainties, erasures,
and mislabelings become productive research material, pointing to transcultural patterns of
paradox and gender trouble that characterize nonbinary trans phenomena, foregrounding the
faultlines running throughout the conceptual system of dualisms. A material-discursive,
nonbinary trans research style can generate sensitivity to difference, with profound con-
sequences for representing gender identity in museums and archives. Johannesson’s recogni-
tion and appropriation of the Arianna image points to the value of archives of museum
photography, both for artistic research and efforts to trace trans thematics in institutional
collections. In consequence, we argue strongly for collective resistance to the destruction of
archives of museum photography, decisions that are routinely justified by false dichotomies
between originals and reproductions. We further argue for the value of signaling gender
 Nonbinary Difference 177

difference as a theme in museum collections, both in-house by institutional staff and in self-
organized community efforts to produce a distributed, freely accessible internet trans archive.
Conversely, as more research is undertaken using digital resources, it must be remembered
that both traditional museum photography and contemporary photogrammetry are fictive
arts; their framings, labels, and categories are material conditions, intensifying or suppressing
aspects of the things they depict. At the outset of this chapter, we declared our aim was
connectivity and complexity, rather than firm conclusions. In closing, we propose that
nonbinary difference be understood as materially generated; ostensibly abstract questions of
discourses and systems are inseparable from the specifics of their embodiment.

Notes
1 We thank the British School at Rome for supporting research conducted in 2016–2017 and
obtaining permission to publish images.
2 “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the
human subject and … the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation”
(Brown 2001).
3 The fictive is a matter of something being treated as if it were the case, a situation that cannot be
explained under a true/false binary or dualism (Iser 1993, 87–170).
4 Binaries are either/or distinctions like on/off. Dualisms like up/down include the possibility of
intermediate points between opposites. Nonbinary identities exist beyond the opposition of male/
masculine and female/feminine, and so are potentially non-dualistic; that is, nonbinary experience
cannot be reduced to a middle ground.
5 Stryker and Currah note the importance Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to archival and trans
studies, to which we add the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, particularly as articulated in Difference
and Repetition (1994). Our understanding is also informed by writing on New Materialism by
authors including Manuel DeLanda (2000) and Karen Barad (2007). While our thinking is indebted
to these authors, we avoid definitive terminology, retaining an intentionally informal sense of words
as labels. Whether spoken or written, labels are things with their own complex, contingent his-
tories, as material as the artifacts they name. Writing, speech, and thinking are all inescapably
material-discursive phenomena.
6 The printed label performs a different kind of erasure, stating Kaineus was “loved by Poseidon and
asked the god to change her into an invulnerable youth.” In a less euphemistic account, Kaineus
was raped by Poseidon, and in consequence asked to be made atrötos, impervious to penetration
(D’Angour 2011, 78).
7 See Dotson 2011, Ogles 2016, and Siobhan 2017.
8 As part of our questioning of binaries and embrace of connectivity, we are experimenting with
collaboration in this chapter; most sections are written by both of us, while two are single-authored
accounts, written in the first person though edited together, are identified by initials.
9 David Bate suggests Cahun’s performative visual strategies are informed by her questioning of
gender, identity, and representation: “To become a not-a-woman and not-a-man in representation
is to become what?” (1994, 9).
10 For Barad, it is crucial to incorporate materiality to understand power: “agential realism takes
account of the fact that the forces at work in the materialization of bodies are not only social, and
the bodies produced are not all human … [proposing] a new understanding of how discursive
practices are related to the material world. This is a significant result with far-reaching consequences
for grasping and attending to the political possibilities for change” (2007, 34).
11 “Dionysos was god of the mask” (Wiles 2000, 147). The mask was “the defining convention of Greek
theatre” and could convey different emotions depending on the angle from which it was seen, as in
Noh. While Greek ritual masks were temporary performance objects, they had a sculptural form “made
of glued rags” which “covered the whole head,” approaching that of the bust (147).
12 Spivak (1997, xiv) describes this paradoxical erasure as follows: “This is to write a word, cross it out,
and then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is
necessary, it remains legible.)”
178 Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur

13 The term scopic regime was introduced by French psychoanalyst Christian Metz in 1982, before
being taken up by Martin Jay to describe competing “visual subcultures” within “the ubiquity of
vision as the master sense of modernity” (1988, 3–4). On racialized typology and “scopic regimes”
as material spatial discourses, see Tythacott (2011).
14 See, for example, Didi-Huberman (2010) and Holly and Smith (2008, xxi). For an introduction to
Warburg’s project, see Johnson (2012).
15 On the dualistic cultural trope of claiming transgender identities as “fake” copies of “original” or
“natural” gender identities, see Serano (2007, 13–14, 37–52).

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Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2010. Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back. Madrid: Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Dotson, Hebe. 2011. “TGF Rerun – Transgenderism In Greek Mythology.” TGForum, November 28.
https://tgforum.com/wordpress/tgf-rerun-transgenderism-in-greek-mythology/.
Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
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 Nonbinary Difference 179

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PART IV
Acts of Resistance
Amy K. Levin

Forward-looking museums and those working with them are at the heart of today’s social
change efforts. Institutions around the world are racing to incorporate language about social
justice and/or activism in their mission statements. Consider, too, the title of Robert Janes
and Richard Sandell’s 2019 book - Museum Activism - or the Amsterdam Museum’s invitation
to prominent politicians to tour its collection with members of local LGBTQ+ communities.
At the University of Leicester, home of the world’s foremost Museum Studies program, the
newest Masters-level offering is Socially Engaged Practice in Galleries and Museums. An
impetus to demonstrate the social utility of exhibitionary institutions is evident in these
efforts. In some cases, this impetus is driven by a desire for increased funding or popular
audiences, but much of the work is inspired by genuine commitments to instigate change
and broaden inclusion.
Such commitments to social justice may manifest in unexpected ways or places; their
effects are diffusive. In New York City, Chirlane McCray, wife of mayor Bill De Blasio, is
behind the exhibit, “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York,” at Gracie
Mansion, the official mayoral residence. The eighteenth-century building, characterized by
period furniture and décor, has become part of a celebration of the hundredth anniversary
of US women’s right to vote. The installation of vivid and colorful art by women, many of
them members of ethnic and racial minorities, in a home built by slave labor is a prominent
sign of the municipal administration’s promotion of women’s rights and needs, even as it
offers the public opportunities to learn about artists whose stories have been lost or
neglected (Steinhauer 2019).
Women’s issues are also critically important to internationally recognized artist and activist
Zanele Muholi. Muholi is another individual who resists dominant narratives, drawing
attention to issues ranging from women’s domestic labor to the frequent rape of black les-
bians and transgender people in their native country of South Africa. Muholi, who identifies
as nonbinary, depicts themself with a headdress of clothespins or a garland of vacuum hose
around the head and neck. A short documentary made with Peter Goldsmid counters the
campness with painful descriptions of violation and murder. Muholi has suffered repercus-
sions for the directness of this activism but resists these attempts to silence them. Taken
182 Amy K. Levin

together, the examples of Muholi and McCray as well as activists like them suggest that we
would be remiss in thinking that the oppression of all women is a concern of the past or that
a book like this should focus solely on LGBTQ+ issues.
Implicitly or explicitly, gender activism almost always involves resistance. Narratives governing
sex, sexuality, and gender are deeply entrenched in almost every culture, even as their damaging
effects are denied by those who are empowered by the status quo. A particularly pernicious form
of denial that has become increasingly evident in Western (and Westernized) cultures in the past
few decades is the assertion that societies have become more inclusive and therefore feminism
and activism on behalf of women-identified-women is no longer necessary. The #metoo move-
ment has challenged that belief, shining a spotlight on the continuing mistreatment of women.
Continuing debates over LGBTQ+ rights have similarly exposed persistent inequalities facing
those who identify with any of the letters encompassed by the acronym.
The first half of this section focuses on “unruly women” and museum activism on their
behalf. Irina Mihalache, whose research casts an unblinking gaze on the role of females in
museums, addresses an understudied topic – the role of the female volunteer. Focusing on the
important work of such women at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mihalache complicates the ste-
reotype of the typical female museum volunteer – white, upper middle class, confirming tra-
ditional gender roles by using this work primarily for social reasons. Mihalache proposes instead
that these women used their privilege to affect museum collecting policies as well as other
practices. They diversified the museum from within, creating a new model of female agency.
Jana Sverdljuk takes a different approach, writing about objects related to women in a
digital museum. She explains how tags and categorization may render females’ lives and labor
more visible, in much the same way as the queer tagging at the V&A described in Chapter 5.
Yet Sverdljuk goes further, demonstrating the subversive ways in which females have resisted
male authorities and describing an effort to situate the contributions of female immigrants
within spaces that are important to them.
Mihalache and Sverdljuk keep women’s stories in the spotlight so that their own writing
becomes an extension of activist practice. Brenda Malone, of the National Museum of
Ireland, contributes to this practice. She describes the effort to collect the ephemera of the
Irish abortion rights referendum in 2018 so that the national museum will be prepared to
display this critical moment in women’s history at future times. Such proactive initiatives
remedy past neglect and exclusions; they have been recognized by other organizations and
are being attempted elsewhere.
The subsection focusing on women’s museum activism is followed, appropriately, by
one on problematic narratives. While every chapter in this volume in some way describes
such stories, those in this part of the book address them most directly. Catherine O’Don-
nell’s analysis of the groundbreaking Never Going Underground exhibition at the People’s
History Museum in Manchester (UK) considers the roles of LGBTQ+ communities both
as coproducers and audiences. The involvement of local organizations in particular was
mutually beneficial to them and the institution, leading to longer-term collaborations and
continuing social activism.
As a collector and patron, Gertrude Stein was an activist on behalf of Modern art; living
openly with another woman, she was a feminist and gender activist as well. In assessing
reactions to Stein, Hayden Hunt analyzes how she is represented in several exhibitions. He
argues that Stein’s sexuality has been minimized in art historical accounts of her life and
work, and he compares catalogue essays to prove his point. Hunt’s research deepens
 Acts of resistance 183

precepts about catalogue writing proposed in this book’s introduction. He also demon-
strates how smaller institutions may have freedom and flexibility to explore topics that
should not be – but remain – controversial, such as sexuality. In this, his chapter reinforces
arguments proposed in Chapter 7.
Co-editor Joshua Adair concludes the subsection by examining the growing business of novels
that attract and accompany visitors to historic sites – in this case, Christian narratives attached to
mansions that were owned by prominent Confederate slaveholders in the USA. Adair exposes
the underside of these purportedly moral texts, illustrating how they support white supremacy
and traditional gender roles. Female fans of the novels are encouraged to replace the difficult
truths of the sites’ histories with idealized fictional accounts. When engaged couples and others
rent these homes for celebratory events, they support and perpetuate the narratives the sites
promote. They may believe that they are paying for a short-term fantasy of elegance and dec-
orum, but they are in fact spending blood money, shoehorning their events into histories of
slavery and oppression. In this case, it is Adair’s chapter that offers activist engagement, resisting
the novels’ narratives and urging change.
Reminding readers that the story of women’s oppression is not over and illustrating the
persistence of problematic narratives, the chapters in this part of the book prepare for the
concluding section, which rejects binaries of gender and sexuality in favor of more radical
approaches. These approaches are designed to spur readers to innovation and exploration in
places as surprising as a mayoral residence or images as startling as a helmet made out of a
pasta strainer.

References
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nsion.html.
A. Unruly Women
15
THE ABSENT HISTORY OF FEMALE
VOLUNTEERS AT THE ART GALLERY
OF TORONTO
Irina D. Mihalache

This chapter is inspired by the words of Martin Baldwin, Director of the Art Gallery of
Toronto1 (AGT) from 1947 to 1960, whose tenure coincided with decades of women’s
committee work at the gallery. Asked to offer remarks at the first general meeting of the
Volunteer Committees of Art Museums (VCAM) in November 1952, Baldwin stated, “I
don’t think that any museum, no matter how well founded it may be, can afford to be
without a Women’s Committee, simply for that particular quality of outspoken criticism and
the refusal to accept put-off answers” (Women’s Committee 1952, 4). Since 1945, when the
Women’s Committee was formed by the museum’s Council to remedy the postwar drop in
the number of visitors, its members worked assiduously “to foster interest in the Art Gallery
of Toronto” (Women’s Committee 1946b, 4). They wrote bylaws for their organization; put
in place a leadership structure with an executive board and standing committees;2 developed
programs for education, extension services, and art rentals; raised funds to purchase artwork;
built collaborations with media and commercial partners; and campaigned for new members.
In fact, some of the most important initiatives that connected the museum with its commu-
nities were set in motion by the Women’s Committee. These volunteer women made space
for themselves within patriarchal institutional structures, and, in the process, reimagined the
museum as a social place. Using the AGT’s Women’s Committee and its junior counterpart3
as two case studies, this chapter suggests a way in which museum studies literature can
include women’s committees in the telling of art museum histories. If Baldwin’s words are
true and women’s committees have been integral to the functioning of art galleries, then
their absence from museum studies literature ought to be troubling.
Despite the fact that most art museums in North America had extremely active women’s
committees, their histories are mostly untold. Lianne McTavish (2008) and Anne Whitelaw
(2012, 2014) opened the doors for research on women’s groups in museums, documenting
the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick and the Women’s
Society at the Edmonton Art Gallery respectively. McTavish indicated the absence of
women’s stories from historical accounts about museums and advocated that “acknowledging
women’s contributions to the early museum does more than simply add detail to the existing
museum narratives. Taking women seriously can shed light on a range of issues, including the
188 Irina D. Mihalache

shifting historical definition of museums” (2008, 112). Anne Whitelaw wrote about the
Women’s Society of the Edmonton Art Gallery, “whether because of the domestic character
of many of their activities, or the assumption that members of the Women’s Society are little
more than stereotypes of ‘the ladies who lunch,’ the work of women’s museum volunteer
organizations remains unexamined” (2012, 358). Because these volunteers were usually quite
privileged and not obviously engaged in feminist politics, they might not constitute an
obvious focus for those interested in stories of disruption and activism. Female artists, edgy
collectors, and supporters of the suffrage movement who were vocal about gender inequal-
ities in museums might seem likelier subjects for case studies. However, I argue that attention
to women’s committees exposes a different form of marginality, which needs to be
problematized.
Writing inclusive museum histories requires a focus away from the curator, the collection,
and the exhibition – sites that receive the majority of analytical scrutiny – and an engagement
with the complex network of communities and practices essential to running these institu-
tions. The Women’s Committee’s involvement in the museum’s business, alongside curators,
financial officers, and directors, makes them an essential component of a reflective and
inclusive institutional history. Most importantly, for the purposes of this edited volume,
placing women’s committees at the center of art museums’ histories makes visible not only
the gendered work that produced the museum as a social institution, but also the diverse
strategies through which women made space for themselves. In this way, the committees
are evidence of Kate Hill’s assertion in her book Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity
and the Gendering of Knowledge about how the “ambiguity of museums for women … offered
real new possibilities while simultaneously denying equality” (2016, 119).
An approach centered on female volunteers illustrates this point. It allows us to imagine
how North American art museums during the postwar decades looked from a woman’s
perspective. Surprisingly, a woman’s viewpoint might not support the clear-cut gender divide
proposed by Marjorie Schwarzer, who observes that “paid male directors and curators
cavorted in the corridors of power and formed the tight alliances known as the old boy club,
while unpaid women toured visitors through exhibitions and planned membership drives and
glittering galas, bringing in the hard cash” (2010, 19). Simply put, volunteer women did not
experience their positions in such terms. These women’s groups were not confined to their
roles solely by interactions with the AGT’s male leaders and curators, but they had to address
the interests and needs of numerous additional groups and communities as well, including other
departments of the museum; arts and community organizations in Toronto; Canadian busi-
nesses; visitors and museum members. Moreover, the two women’s committees experienced
internal tensions, and members were sometimes confronted by the limitations of their social
and economic class. The volunteer woman’s experience at the AGT involved numerous forms
of performing or hiding femininity in public.
The two women’s committees at the AGT initiated multiple projects, each worthy of its
own chapter. This chapter engages with one of the earliest initiatives of the Women’s
Committee – the Purchase Fund – that was intended to assist the gallery in purchasing new
artwork. This example showcases encounters with communities internal to the AGT; illus-
trates varying levels of agency of the women’s committees; traces the development of
women’s professional strategies; and exposes the use of forms of domestic knowledge, some
more connected to expressions of femininity than others. The Purchase Fund is significant
because many of the fundraising efforts of the two committees after the 1950s were directed
 The Absent History of Female Volunteers 189

toward acquiring new art. Archival texts suggest that the current collection of the museum is
partially influenced by the collecting agendas of women volunteers. While this project is only
one of the numerous initiatives developed by the women’s committees during their years of
activity, it illustrates the importance of women’s volunteer work in shaping the AGT’s col-
lections. However, little evidence of this history is visible today. Both women’s groups at the
AGT were minority and dominant at different moments in their history; they asserted their
centrality through numerous tactics which brought them into dialogue with museum
professionals, local and national press, and well-known community groups.

Women’s committees in the archives

When I started researching the history of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which was founded in
1926, I did not anticipate finding such a wealth of materials on the women’s committees.
Rich archival materials document the work of the AGT’s two women’s committees between
1945 and 1974, when the Women’s Committee became, not without a fight, the Volunteer
Committee. All the initiatives, projects, and surveys, including those that were planned but
never materialized, alongside press coverage and communication with external partners, have
been meticulously recorded. This chapter is based specifically on research conducted with
two components of the Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee fonds: 1) the
general boxes, which include folders with working papers related to the committees’ projects,
such as planning documents, letters, meeting minutes, photographs, press clippings, media
releases, promotional documents, and other ephemera; and 2) the meeting minutes boxes,
which contain bound volumes of minutes from all executive, general, and annual meetings of
the committees, including reports from all the standing committees. These materials are held
at the Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives, hereafter abbreviated as ETLA. Broader
institutional records, such as minutes from annual meetings, art bulletins, program materials,
and handbooks, position the work of the committees within a wider context.
Despite their visibility at the AGT in Toronto and nationally, the stories of the committees
are mostly missing from academic work. Whitelaw criticized the groups’ invisibility: “these
women have been twice marginalized: first by the board and professional staff of the Edmon-
ton Art Gallery, who dismissed their aesthetic taste and gave minimal recognition to their
activities, and second by accounts of women in art institutions by scholars who cannot narrate
their activities in the familiar terms of personal accomplishment and innovation” (2012, 374).
While Whitelaw’s second argument applies to the AGT’s women’s committees, I contend that
the organizations made themselves so indispensable to the gallery that they cannot be char-
acterized as marginal, especially in their peak decades. McTavish’s (2008) work on the Ladies’
Auxiliary of the Natural History Society uncovered the struggles of female members to gain
recognition and visibility in an organization dominated by male agendas and perspectives. She
wrote, “when women recognized male authority … they were welcomed by what they
sometimes called their ‘parent organization.’ When the ladies attempted, however, to become
full members or to thwart male supervision, their position on the margins of the organization
was reaffirmed” (100). According to her findings, male members of the Society did not wel-
come women from a position of equality, aiming to keep them at the margins. While the
Women’s Committees at the Art Gallery of Toronto experienced pushback on several issues
from their male colleagues, overall, they had freedom to experiment and significant power to
influence collecting practices and exhibition programming.
190 Irina D. Mihalache

A close examination of the AGO’s archives reveals how forms of marginalization and
attempts to silence volunteer women coexisted with productive interactions with museum
professionals, demonstrating the agency of the women’s committees. Rather than position
the women’s committees and the predominantly male professionals at the AGT as adversaries,
I am interested in their processes of negotiation, which often made use of forms of
femininity.

Women’s committees: A different kind of marginality

Historically, women’s relations with museums have been difficult and complicated,
founded on numerous forms of gender inequality. Museums of different types resisted
women’s desires to take on public roles as artists and museum professionals; they also
perpetuated stereotypes of women through problematic systems of representation. Amy
K. Levin writes that “females have long been represented in Western museums as objects
of the male gaze, whether they were odalisques in gilt-framed oil paintings or nudes in a
variety of sculptured forms. But living females were not always welcome in museums,
either as staff or visitors. . . . In the nineteenth century, women were excluded from the
professional museum workforce because they were unable to obtain the scholarly cre-
dentials to become curators” (2012, 156). After the turn of the last century, women were
able to break certain barriers and become museum professionals, especially in areas related
to education. According to Zankowicz, “women were key players in founding education
and docent departments because these were seen as appropriate ‘feminine’ duties” (2014,
10). Whitelaw points out that “although there have been several volumes exploring
women collectors, curators, patrons, and artists, women’s volunteer organizations … have
largely been ignored” (2012, 358). Two of the most recent volumes exploring women’s
professional presence in museums, Kate Hill’s book mentioned above (2016) and Joan H.
Baldwin and Anne W. Ackerson’s Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace
(2017) barely acknowledge women’s volunteer work.
At the AGT, members of the two women’s committees were mostly middle and upper
class, white, educated, Christian, married women whose main jobs were to run house-
holds, plan parties and other social gatherings, and volunteer. Some of the members were
well-known socialites of Eaton or Gooderham fame, who used their social influence for
the benefit of the AGT. In a report to the Women’s Committee’s 28th Annual Meeting
on May 29, 1974, Mrs R.B. Lind4 reminisced about the organization’s founding in 1945,
when “eight people were called together by Lady Kemp to plan the formation of a
committee to assist the Gallery … this group was increased over the years with a great
deal of thought as to those who were asked to join” (1974, 1–2). This points toward an
elite membership favoring those of similar social and cultural backgrounds.
Inevitably, some of the biases of their class identity would make their way into committee
work at the AGT and would limit the forms of activism that these women could pursue.
Due to their privileged social standing, women’s committees accepted their unpaid circum-
stances without much opposition primarily because they did not need financial compensation
and did not believe that their household responsibilities would enable them to meet the
increased responsibilities associated with paid work. However, their financially stable posi-
tions desensitized them to causes that were being fought for by more militant women’s
groups, such as the suffragists.
 The Absent History of Female Volunteers 191

While the women’s committees tended to be conservative with regard to women’s rights,
their motivations extended beyond the preservation of a social status quo through benevolent
work. Peggy Lownsbrough, President of the Committee from 1955 to 1957, wrote to the
Evaluation Committee5 on October 30, 1964, mentioning that:

The standards of education have produced a rash of highly trained and expert women,
which has come about in this era of specialization. ... Their personal problem is how to
resolve their education with the fundamentals of domesticity; husband, children, and a
miserable lack of unskilled and overpaid domestic help. How to remain interesting, pursue
the awakened and trained talents, and provide a background of security for family life, this is
the monumental task, which they face. Of course these women are bored if confined and
wish to make the most of the moments when they can re-enter the “outside.”
(1)

This note gets to the root of the women’s desire to make space for their knowledge, expertise,
and creativity in an institution run by their fathers and husbands. They had great awareness of the
imbalances that existed between their perspectives, manifested in their projects, and those of the
male administrators and curators. Margaret Godsoe, President of the Women’s Committee from
1965 to 1967, jokingly talked about this tension: “throughout our 21 years, we have continually
experimented. [The] Board of Directors have, I am sure, been leery about projects suggested by
us, but [been] able to approve them because if they ‘flopped’ or drew criticism, one could shake
one’s head and sigh, ‘what will those women do next?’” (1967, 2). Despite their education and
experience working in a museum environment, committee members were often confronted
with such stereotypes about women. Occasionally, they used these stereotypes to conduct
experimental projects and to assert their agency through daring initiatives, some central to AGT’s
collections.

Shopping for art: The Women’s Committee’s Purchase Fund

In 1950, the Women’s Committee decided, together with curator Sydney Key, to purchase
Still Life with Flowers by Ben Nicholson6 for £100 (Lind 1974, 3). This was the first of
numerous acquisitions through the Purchase Fund, which was replenished annually through
revenues from events planned by the committee, such as an annual ball, a folk festival, a
Christmas party, film nights, speakers’ series, and snack lunches. Lind recalls, “the Purchase
Fund was established [in 1947] as we began to accumulate funds from other early projects,
the most profitable being Fashion Shows. ... There was at that time no fund in the Gallery
besides our Purchase Fund to buy contemporary paintings from other than Canadians” (3).
Schwarzer points out that early female museum professionals “challenged the aesthetic
status quo, promoting modern art and Bauhaus design” (2010, 19); her argument extends to
women’s groups at the AGT, which pushed the gallery to purchase contemporary art by
citizens of other nations. Even before the fund was established, giving members a voice in
major collecting decisions, the Women’s Committee identified gaps in exhibition sche-
dules, which they were allowed to fill. The necessity of supplementing more traditional art
shows with displays of contemporary crafts secured the Women’s Committee a spot on
AGT’s Exhibition Committee in 1946. That year, the Women’s Committee’s interest in
recent work was also evident in its planning for a special Gallery Week to promote the
192 Irina D. Mihalache

AGT to the wider Toronto public. They decided to organize a Women’s Week, which
would bring “either the work of or possibly individuals such as Dorothy Draper (Interior
Designer), Hulda (Artist), Tina Lesser (Fabric Design), women artists, designers, or sculptors
to the gallery” (Women’s Committee 1946a, 2). Exhibitions of objects defined as craft –
flower arrangements, jewelry, or modern furniture – would not have been planned by
AGT curators; however, the Women’s Committee brought these popular forms into the
gallery with great success. For example, a flower show in 1945 brought 6,781 visitors to
the gallery in one week (Women’s Committee 1946c, 1).
Gearing up for the first major purchase in 1950, the Committee decided to organize a series of
sales, which would achieve two major outcomes: to raise money to buy new artwork and to
promote young Canadian artists. The first sale, held at the Castle Frank residence of Lady Kemp
on December 5 and 6, 1947, raised “$1,292.03, of which $485.95 is from the sale of 51 pictures
and sculptures and $806.06 from the raffle” (Women’s Committee 1948a, 1). In following years,
the exhibit and sale of works by contemporary Canadian artists would be organized, with strong
support from the AGT administration, in the gallery itself. In 1948, for example, the committee
secured the print room, and Mrs Matthews, the chair of the Purchase Fund Committee,
“arranged to obtain furniture from the Royal Ontario Museum and from the homes of several of
our members, with which the print room would be decorated in sections to simulate rooms in
private houses”7 (Women’s Committee 1948c, 4). Today’s museum professionals might be sur-
prised by the freedom allowed to the women, especially in selling art. However, for a relatively
young gallery with a small permanent collection, flexibility was necessary in order to increase the
artwork offering. Martin Baldwin, the museum’s director at the time, was generous with his
allowances for use of space and project development, in recognition of the revenues that the
women were able to raise.
The space that volunteer women made for themselves within the hierarchy of the gallery’s
administration paved the way for the fund’s existence. The Purchase Fund Committee con-
tinued to work closely with the director and the curator to decide the nature of the acqui-
sitions. An overview of the purchases from 1950 until 1970 demonstrates that the Women’s
Committee’s preference for contemporary art was generally accepted by curators. A letter
from Sydney Key, dated March 25, 1953, informed the Women’s Committee that “at a
meeting of the Exhibitions Committee, Mrs Matthews announced that the Women’s Pur-
chase Fund[s] in the amount of approximately $2,700 were to be spent at the discretion of
the director and the curator. . . . Subsequently, the director and the curator decided that the
money should be added to the Jubilee Ball Fund8 to make an amount sufficient to purchase the
painting by Dufy Le Havre for $6,500 from Seligmann’s, New York” (Key 1953). Ultimately,
the Purchase Fund Committee bought forty-nine pieces and contributed significant amounts to
the purchase of two more expensive works, one by Italian artist Tintoretto. Acquired between
January 1950 and May 1970, the pieces were created in diverse media, including oil, gouache,
bronze, charcoal, acrylic resin, and fluorescent light. They include some of the most daring
acquisitions of that period, such as Marino Marini’s Cavalier (purchased in December 1952), Paul
Klee’s Hard and Soft I (purchased in February 1955), and Andy Warhol’s Elvis Presley I & II
(purchased in March 1966).
The participation in institution-wide decisions related to art purchases brought members of the
committee into dialogue with Canadian artists such as A.J. Casson, who served on a small advi-
sory board for the Purchase Fund, as well as with art dealers from Paris, London, and New York;
curators and directors from other large art galleries in North America; and members of the AGT’s
 The Absent History of Female Volunteers 193

Council. Jean Hanna Allward, the chair of the Purchase Fund Committee at the time, reported
on May 16, 1960, that “the Committee decided, after thorough discussion of several possibilities,
to direct this Fund toward the purchase of contemporary [US] American paintings. ... Through
the interest and courtesy of Dr Baldwin, a number of museum directors in the United States
advised us of their opinions of contemporary American painters.” The result of these consulta-
tions brought into the museum’s collection Sam Francis’s Two Worlds. Interestingly enough, this
painting was mentioned in a letter by Jean Sutherland Boggs, one of the first female curators at
the AGT, to the editor of The Evening Telegram: “the column of November 1st by McKenzie
Porter does not mention the impossibility of measuring the contributions of any Women’s
Committee to cultural activities in dollars and cents. ... Quite aside from any monetary value,
their purchases in their lack of provincialism and their daring have enlivened the collections of
The Art Gallery of Toronto” (1963, 1). Boggs further mentioned that Two Worlds, purchased in
1960, doubled its value in only three years (1963). More than a decade later, another report from
the newly renamed Purchase Committee praised the “enthusiastic direction of our two Curators,
Messrs. Mario Amaya and Dennis Young. All those who have benefited from their knowledge
and experience know the value of their assistance” (Fleming 1971). The encounters between
curators and volunteer women reveal a history of dialogue, negotiation, compromise, and overall
respectful interactions.
The space that the Women’s Committee made for their perspectives on art purchases was a
result of their financial power – after all, they were major fundraisers for the gallery; planned
fundraising initiatives which would benefit multiple communities, such as young Canadian
artists; and their vision was grounded in education, consultation, and research. These encounters
with the professional staff suggest that the Women’s Committee was anything but marginal
within the institution. It is probable that the social standing of the women played a role in their
relations with the director and curator, but the professional conduct and knowledge gained
through their travels and education also contributed to their being treated as partners rather than
subordinates. The tight structure of the Women’s Committee, evident in meeting minutes and
subcommittee reports, created a system of shared responsibility and accountability which
convinced the gallery’s higher administration of their ability and expertise.

Feminine encounters: Negotiating space, building community in

feminist ways
Being part of a large institution, particularly in a volunteer capacity, required that the women’s
committees engage in processes of adaptation and negotiation in order to make space for them-
selves, gain respect from male colleagues, and accomplish other goals. These encounters happened
in a specific historical and social context, in which women’s groups were sometimes perceived as a
nuisance or “ladies who lunch” (Whitelaw 2012, 358) because their power was threatening to the
authorities (Boylan 2002). Their duties in museums were also seen as extensions of their maternal
obligations to the nation (Ginzberg 1990). The AGT women’s committees were a nuisance in the
sense that they advocated for the interests of the gallery’s visitors, which sometimes collided with
the ideals of the board and higher administration. They were “ladies who lunched,” because many
meetings happened while dining and having tea; in addition, many of their most successful pro-
grams – snack lunches and men’s lunches – revolved around gourmet dining in the museum. They
embodied maternal instincts because they were part of a specific social class with a traditional vision
of the family unit, where the mother was the center of the domestic sphere. Nonetheless, they
194 Irina D. Mihalache

were educated, knowledgeable, and able to translate domestic and maternal expertise into the
public domain. By doing so, they challenged the status quo of the institution as they demanded to
be respected by male administrators and curators. Their demands were justified by the quality of
their activities: the structure of their organization was often superior to that of the gallery itself; their
projects were solidly researched, tested, altered, and if unsuccessful, canceled.
Ironically, they became marginal as the gallery grew in size, expanded its reach, and new
professional methods removed power from volunteer groups, placing it in the hands of museum
staff who had acquired necessary training and expertise. This trend paralleled what happened in
many career fields – but earlier – as they became professionalized. Paradoxically, after the 1970s,
when many women entered the museum workforce (Schwarzer 2010), women’s committees
seemed less and less necessary. In the case of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Women’s Com-
mittee became, in 1974, the Volunteer Committee, with a Junior Committee counterpart. As
the AGO extended its departments and hired new staff, the Volunteer Committee had to find a
place within the reorganized hierarchies. From a position of power and agency, the renamed
women’s committees transitioned toward new projects and goals, which resulted in time in
institutional forgetfulness. The AGO did not intend to minimize the memory of the committees’
work, but it also did not account for the preservation of the committee’s history when telling its
current story. Many other institutions did the same, making it difficult for scholars engaged in the
study of art museums to connect with these histories. My hope is that this chapter, which adds to
the work of Anne Whitelaw and Lianne McTavish, will raise awareness of the immensely
important work of women during formative decades in art museum history and encourage
others to document these contributions before they are lost to institutional memory.
Historically, art museums had problematic relations with many communities – migrants, the
sexually diverse, and women – due to dubious collecting practices rooted in colonialism, male-
oriented hierarchies, and elitist ideologies. Contemporary North American institutions have
reflected deeply on these historical legacies, aiming to build trust and mend broken relations. Such
initiatives are visible in community collaborations, guest curators, and shared authority. However,
professionals could also turn their attention internally, to their institutions’ own histories, and
highlight strategies which women’s groups used decades ago to assert their power, experience, and
knowledge. As other marginalized groups seek to become more important players in museums,
they, too, can learn from the strategies of the volunteer women’s committees.

Notes
1 The Art Gallery of Toronto changed its name to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1967; when referring
to events prior to the name change, I use the institution’s original name. For later events, I employ
the current name.
2 In 1946, the Women’s Committee had four standing subcommittees; in 1974, when the Women’s
Committee became the Volunteer Committee, it had seventeen subcommittees.
3 The Junior Women’s Committee (JWC) was established in 1949 to assist the senior one with
existing projects and to develop and run its own initiatives, such as the annual balls and men’s lun-
ches. The JWC was composed of women thirty-five years and younger. The group had its own
internal structure, based on that of the senior committee. Once they reached the maximum age,
members of the JWC could continue as members of the Women’s Committee.
4 Members of the women’s committees used the names of their husbands in official documents.
Sometimes, their first names were recorded, so, whenever possible, I have used their full names. In
some cases, such as that of Mrs R.B. Lind, I was unable to find the member’s first name, so I used
what was available from the archives. As I continue my work, I aim to identify the members’ first
names and use their full names in my writing.
 The Absent History of Female Volunteers 195

5 The Evaluation Committee was formed in 1963 to determine Women’s Committee members’ views
on the group’s purpose, policies, and practices. In this case, ninety-three members filled out
questionnaires for the Evaluation Committee.
6 Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) was a British artist associated with Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and
Constructivism.
7 The Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) is the largest museum of art, world culture, and natural
history in Canada.
8 The ball was organized by the Women’s Committee in 1951 to celebrate the gallery’s Golden
Jubilee.

References
Note: In these references, the Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, will be
abbreviated as ETLA.
Allward, Jean Hanna. 1960. “Report of the Purchase Fund Committee to the Annual Meeting of the
Women’s Committee of the Art Gallery of Toronto, May 16th, 1960.” Women’s Committee and
Junior Women’s Committee Meeting Minutes. ETLA.
Baldwin, Joan H., and Anne W. Ackerson. 2017. Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace.
London: Routledge.
Boggs, Jean Sutherland. 1963. “Letter to the Editor.” The Evening Telegram, November 1. Women’s
Committee Fonds. ETLA.
Boylan, Anne. 2002. The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Ginzberg, Lori D. 1990. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth
Century United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Godsoe, Margaret. 1967. “Report of the President. The 21st Annual Meeting of the Women’s Committee
of the Art Gallery.” Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Fleming, Marie. 1971. “Report of the Purchase Committee, the 25th Annual Meeting of the Women’s
Committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, May 18th, 1971.” Women’s Committee and Junior
Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Hill, Kate. 2016. Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Key, Sydney. 1953. Letter to Women’s Advisory Committee. March 25. Women’s Committee
Fonds. ETLA.
Levin, Amy K. 2012. “Unpacking Gender: Creating Complex Models for Gender Inclusivity in
Museums.” In Museums, Equality and Social Justice, edited by Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale,
156–168. London: Routledge.
Lind, R.B. (Mrs) 1974. “Change in Name Only. Report Given by Mrs. R.B. Lind at Women’s
Committee 28th Annual Meeting.” May 29. Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee
meeting minutes. ETLA.
Lownsbrough, Peggy. 1964. “Comment on Women’s Committee Problems, Re-Evaluation Committee.”
October 30. Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
McTavish, Lianne. 2008. “Strategic Donations: Women and Museums in New Brunswick, 1862–1930.”
Journal of Canadian Studies 42(2): 93–116.
Schwarzer, Marjorie. 2010. “Women in the Temple: Gender and Leadership.” In Gender, Sexuality, and
Museums, edited by Amy K. Levin, 16–27. Abingdon: Routledge.
Whitelaw, Anne. 2012. “Professional/Volunteer: Women at the Edmonton Art Gallery, 1923–1970.”
In Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970, edited by Kristina Huneault and
Janice Anderson, 357–379. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Whitelaw, Anne 2014. “From the Gift Shop to the Permanent Collection: Women and the Circulation
of Inuit Art.” In Craft, Community, and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19th-20th Century,
edited by Janice Helland, Beverly Lemire, and Alena Buis, 105–123. Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
196 Irina D. Mihalache

Women’s Committee. 1946a. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, Held at the Art Gallery, at twelve-thirty o’clock, on Wednesday, January 23rd, 1946.”
Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1946b. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, Held at the Art Gallery on April 23rd, 1946.” Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s
Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1946c. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery
of Toronto, Held at the Art Gallery, on Monday, May 6th, 1946, at 12:30 o’clock.” Women’s
Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1948a. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, Held at in the Grange Library, Monday, January 12th, 1948, at 12:30 o’clock.” Women’s
Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1948b. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Executive of the Women’s Committee of
the Art Gallery of Toronto, held in the Grange House Library, at 11:00 o’clock, on Monday, May
19th, 1948.” Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1948c. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Women’s Committee at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, Held at in the Library of Grange House at 12:30 o’clock on Monday, October 25th,
1948.” Women’s Committee and Junior Women’s Committee meeting minutes. ETLA.
Women’s Committee. 1952. “Conference of Women’s Committees, Held at the Art Gallery of
Toronto, ON, Nov. 10, 11 & 12, 1952.” Women’s Committee Fonds. ETLA.
Zankowicz, Katherine. 2014. “In Her Hands: Women’s Educational Work at the Royal Ontario
Museum, the Canadian National Exhibition, and the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1900s–1950s.” PhD
dissertation, University of Toronto.
16
FROM HANDMADE UNDERWEAR TO THE
LABOR MOVEMENT
Women’s History at Digital Museum

Jana Sverdljuk

This chapter1 examines the ways in which new technologies and methods for aggregating, pre-
senting, and searching the digitized corpus of museum objects – what I call electronic curation –
foster diversity in terms of content, with a special emphasis on the dissemination of local history
from women’s perspectives. I show that electronic curation offers new opportunities to access
forgotten objects, thus giving voice to marginalized figures, such as coastal women in northern
Norway and women migrants living in Oslo. As feminist theories of technology demonstrate,
material entities, including digital museum artifacts, possess not just technical, but performative,
flexible, and discourse-related natures. Digital museum artifacts are not ready-made, but largely
depend upon the efforts of curators, who supply metadata and other qualitative object descrip-
tions. Proceeding from this premise, I demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses identified in
relevant studies in order to explore the democratizing potential of Norway’s Digital Museum
(digitaltmuseum.no) and its ability to retrieve gender-sensitive content. I use the affordances2 of a
keyword-targeted search of this unique digitization project, focusing on three of the results of
searching for women’s story. The examples show how feminist activists and museum curators can
make local history from the perspective of women visible, filling gaps in the knowledge base.

Electronic curation: Objects, tools, (non)-experts, metadata

The digitization of the humanities and cultural heritage sector creates new opportunities for
knowledge production. In recent years, scholars have celebrated the possibilities of computer-
driven analyses of e-books, digital reproductions of photographs, original artworks, and museum
objects (Burdick et al. 2012). In Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and
Humanities, Erik T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder study the phenomenon of digital humanities
and how internet and digital tools used collectively – what the authors term e-research (electronic
research) – transform knowledge. According to them, internet and digital tools affect how
humanities content is disseminated and what we learn about culture. Communication technolo-
gies thus have a significant impact on our knowledge about cultural artifacts as well as on how
disciplines are organized (2015, 206). These circumstances point to the scientization of the
humanities and a new, digital mode of curation for museum objects.
198 Jana Sverdljuk

This new mode of cultural heritage dissemination incorporates the best practices of e-
research, such as aggregating and processing large amounts of data and collaborating in
the production of knowledge. The result is a new museum practice - electronic curation.
To understand electronic curation, theories from the field of science, technology, and
society studies, or STS, prove helpful (Bijker et al. 2012; MacKenzie and Wajcman
1985). Actor-network theory, one of the central theories in STS studies, states that the
functioning of an innovation can be explained only as a constantly shifting network of
relations, which involve both technological and human actors, or “actants” (Latour 2005;
Law and Hassard 1999). Following actor-network theory, the new practices of electronic
curation can be described as a complex landscape (network) of aggregated museums
objects, digital technologies, groups of experts, and separate individuals, as well as dis-
courses involved in the production of digital cultural heritage archives. STS theory
facilitates a focus on the relationship between the technical and the social, overcoming
techno-deterministic approaches to solving the question of how technology is enacted3 in
social and cultural settings, such as cultural heritage institutions. Notwithstanding the
material agency of digital technology, its essence as well as its effects are not stable and
fixed, but largely depend on how humans program it.
Based on this approach, digital museum objects should be perceived not only as simple copies
of analog artifacts or solely as numerical and electronic entities, but as flexible, dynamic, and
changeable techno-cultural hubs. One can apply to digital museum objects the idea of the body
multiple developed by the feminist STS scholar Annemarie Mol (2002) in the context of medical
practices. Mol argues that the human body or, one may say, any material entity, is always “more
than one and less than many,” meaning that it never exists independently from our perception of
it, or of our daily sociomaterial practices that “enact” it in various ways (1–29). In other words,
reality is always manifested through social practices. For example, the establishment of the reality
of a disease – the diagnosis – produces various effects. Disease and treatment are influenced by
social norms, cultural attitudes, and beliefs that, in turn, affect the body itself.
When applying these ontological observations to digitized museum artifacts, one might say
that the reality of a digital museum object will always depend on the sociocultural practices
of electronic curation and be influenced by the discourses and beliefs of those who create
metadata and design algorithms. As cultural heritage researcher Ole Marius Hylland (2014)
indicates (referring to Kalay 2008, 6), the digitization of museum objects differs from the
digitization of books. In his article section titled Digitaisering av kulturarv – en kort historie, or
Digitization of Cultural Heritage – A Short History (my translation), he states that in a traditional
museum, objects can be experienced in a multisensory fashion, whereas in an online envir-
onment, curators must decide which content will accompany a digitized object. Each
museum object is “more than one,” but “less than many”; the artifact changes meaning
depending on the information attached to it, though it retains a certain material stability. The
three examples analyzed in this article illustrate this point.

Postcolonial feminism and policies of electronic curation

The digitization of cultural heritage has great democratic potential, allowing us to change a
masculinist tradition of curation that has paraded as gender-neutral within the museum sector
(Levin 2010, 5). Since the process of digitization is a complex interplay between technical
and cultural competence, museum workers can actively cocreate digital museum objects by
 Women’s History at Digital Museum 199

taking into consideration users’ identity categories, such as gender, ethnicity, race, and/or
socioeconomic class. To codesign digital museum objects in line with the principle of
diversity, postcolonial and intersectional feminist theories can be helpful. Intersectional fem-
inism emphasizes the way in which subjects are situated in a complex discursive web of
power relations conditioned by class, gender, ethnicity, and other axes of power (Berg et al.
2010; Lykke 2005; Staunæs and Søndergaard 2006).
Whereas intersectional feminism has been widely applied in social studies and the
humanities as well as in numerous political projects, the theories and practices of digital
curation have yet to adopt this perspective consistently. Indeed, Alan Liu points out that
digital humanities, both as an emerging scholarly field and in practical projects, lacks critical
self-reflection. As Liu emphasizes, digital humanities, initially known as humanities com-
puting, did not manage to join the intellectual movements of new media studies and
poststructuralism, which developed after the May 1968 rebellions in France (2012). Yet the
critical approach of intersectional feminism can provide guidance in actively designing and
creating digital museum objects so that they acquaint users with local history from the
perspective of populations that have been underrepresented in cultural memory institutions
and their exhibitions.
Affordances of digital technologies can enhance the democratic potential of cultural
institutions. However, in the context of museum digitization the main emphasis centers
upon the possibilities of aggregation, accessibility, and the availability of objects. Simulta-
neously, in European contexts, the process of digitizing cultural heritage has been accom-
panied by discourses promoting the preservation of national cultures, which are perceived
as being threatened by global capitalism and Anglophone culture. Politicians and the cul-
tural elite are concerned that Anglophone global media enterprises like Google and
Amazon dominate the sphere of information distribution, marginalizing national European
cultural institutions and their contents. These concerns for the survival of European cultures
inspired the creation of the virtual European portal, Europeana.eu (Purday 2009). Similar
arguments govern national policies regarding digitization in Norway and Sweden, where right-
wing politics coupled with nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and gendered stigmatization of
migrants have started to dominate, as in other parts of Europe and in the USA. Buttressed by
these policies, efforts at cultural heritage digitization fail to take into account diversity or to
problematize how gender, sexuality, ability, culture, ethnicity, age, and other aspects of social
difference are represented in digital space.

Digital museum: Making women’s and migrants’ local history visible

In what follows, I will explore the potential of digital aggregation and search technologies in
regard to discovering women’s and migrants’ local history.4 Digital Museum (or DigitaltMuseum),
the focus of this case study, is a database for Norwegian and Swedish historical museums and
collections. It contains objects from approximately 251 institutions. The site includes roughly 4.4
million digital objects: 2.6 million photographs; 1.7 million “things”; more than half a million fine
artworks; multiple architectural objects; media; and over four thousand digital narratives. New
objects are added daily. The majority of objects are disseminated through Europeana.eu, creating a
common European digital cultural space. As Digital Museum’s mission statement explains, the
collection is provided for “image-searching, studies, in-depth research, education, and for the
mutual development of knowledge” (DigitaltMuseum 2018).
200 Jana Sverdljuk

The digitization of traditional museum collections and archives, together with the influx of
privately produced content, has created opportunities for the public to access neglected or for-
gotten work by women. Due to the affordances of aggregation and keyword searching, one can
discover diverse women’s and migrants’ stories which challenge the universal masculinist con-
ception of local history and cultural heritage. At the same time, as Mona Holm, director of the
Women’s Museum in Kongsvinger, points out, Digital Museum holds many objects that are not
classified by gender-sensitive keywords, and many entries are incomprehensible to the end user.
The creation of electronic descriptions of museum objects was undertaken fifteen years ago for
the sole use of museum workers. Metadata therefore often consists primarily of an object’s
identification number, its archive location, the material from which it was made, and other
technical information. The creators of Digital Museum also report that the process of registering
digital objects has not followed any logic and consequently the metadata is inconsistent and
sometimes chaotic. The example in The Big Patchwork section of this chapter illustrates this
point. Similarly, Purday, who conducted research about Europeana, remarks: “The lack of
rich metadata has an impact on how accurately search results are retrieved and how material
displays in the timeline. It is also the case that in order to be able to incorporate the widest
variety of standards, Europeana has adopted a limited metadata schema, which is not always
able to reflect the richness of some of the metadata that is supplied” (2009, 175).
In the following pages, I analyze three fragments from the Digital Museum collection of
stories and digital objects, which I discovered by using the thematic search words, women’s story. I
am informally titling these sets of digital objects The Big Patchwork, Coastal Women in Norway, and
In Her Footsteps: Prominent Women in the Multicultural Oslo District Grønland. Many of the retrieved
digital objects were narratives created by local museum curators and women activists, together
with more distant users. At the time I undertook the search, I discovered 197 digital objects,
comprising four types of artifacts: 110 digital stories, seventy-eight object images, one map, and
one photograph, and other random objects outside these categories. A satellite map indicated the
origin of each object in Norway. The digital objects that appeared in the search reflected social
challenges, diverse experiences (including those of immigrants), political activities, and paths
toward professional employment for women.
Applying Mol’s idea of “body multiples,” I will also show how the meanings of objects
changed depending on the scope and quality of curatorial content attached to them. In par-
ticular, the quality of metadata affects our perception of objects. Much of the content of
Digital Museum remains to be created by curators as they provide additional gender-sensitive
metadata and identify new keywords. For the time being, categories related to the keywords
are less well developed. For example, a quick search using the keyword sex turns up a set of
old books with erotic content, pornographic journals, and other objects without further
description. Searching with the keyword gender locates old images of ladies in hats, leaving
the viewer to guess how these objects were selected to represent the theme.

The Big Patchwork

When we scroll through the list of objects that appear after searching for women’s story, we
discover a series of photographs of woven clothes, most of which were worn by women.
These include stockings, knee socks, petticoats, underpants, and other sorts of underwear
tagged with information about where the clothes were worn. Viewers see the classifications
attached to the objects by museum workers, for instance, costume and adult, and learn that the
 Women’s History at Digital Museum 201

garments were handmade. This set of photographs evokes images of a gender-segregated

patriarchal society, of women knitting and owning specific kinds of underwear. Viewers
might wonder whether Digital Museum is merely producing a typical, masculinist repre-
sentation of the past, in which men are visible as public workers, warriors, artists, writers, and
politicians, while women are associated with the domestic sphere, reproduction, sex, and
underwear. I had to dig deeper into the metadata to find a brief mention of the book Det
Store Lappeteppet: Også en Kvinnehistorie, or The Big Patchwork: Also a Woman’s Story (my
translation), by Swedish-Finnish journalist and 1970s feminist activist Harriet Clayhills. In her
book, Clayhills demonstrated how the unrecognized domestic labor of women transformed
history, supporting nations and kingdoms (1984). She devoted her text to the study of
women’s domestic cloth production, arguing in favor of new museum practices for collecting
objects of daily use, previously of little interest to archaeologists, historians, and cultural
heritage collectors. However, as Clayhills argues, collecting such objects often facilitates telling
history from women’s perspectives. For example, whereas many household responsibilities have
been divided between the sexes, knitting has almost always been a women’s task, and therefore,
the history of knitting is mostly women’s history.
Information which has been alluded to in the comments attached to the cloth collection at Digital
Museum affords viewers Clayhills’ perspective on the digitally rendered objects. Yet for the majority
of viewers it would be a challenge to find and apply Clayhills’ ideas to this collection. Most will
simply assume the collection represents typical underwear worn by women at a specific point in
history. This example illustrates Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiplicity and the need to help users
establish connections like those offered in Clayhills’ work. Technological objects, such as digital
representations of cloth knit by women, have flexible and multiple meanings that can emerge or
remain hidden depending upon the quality of an object’s or collection’s metadata and other
accompanying information. Curatorial content can transform an object, making it “more than one.”
An object can serve to represent opposing viewpoints, offering multiple perspectives. It is up to
museum curators to supply objects with gender-sensitive metadata, to suggest female-friendly
interpretations of historical objects. Supplying digital objects with this rich curatorial content is a vital
task, especially if we want digital collections to become expressions of our commitment to gender
equality, and not just a random cluster of images or stories, open to sexist interpretations. It is
therefore crucial to develop guidelines to enhance the gender consciousness of museum curators (as
well as their awareness of other diversity categories) when they are creating analog exhibitions and
registering metadata to submit to Digital Museum. That will facilitate the discovery of content
pertaining to women, enabling viewers to engage in local history through the prism of female
experience.

Coastal women in Norway

Another “object” in online museums is a digital story. Digital stories are relatively new to
museums; they were also the most typical objects at the time of my search. As reproductions
of material objects (apart from the materiality of the digital file), they usually tell the history
of streets, cafés, housewares, forgotten photographs, manufactured products, and the like.
These multimedia creations combine photographs, video, animation, sound effects, music,
text, and often a narrative voice in order to yield insights into people’s lives. Among the
digital accounts that appear when searching for women’s story, viewers encounter a colorful
image of crab paste. This digital story told by Børge Evensen informs users that the tin was
202 Jana Sverdljuk

FIGURE 16.1 Screenshot of a search fragment: Kvinnehistorie [women’s story]

Source: © DigitaltMuseum. Objects from Nordfjord Folkemuseum (CC BY-SA).

produced on Seløy, a small island in Northern Norway (DigitaltMuseum 2014a). Business-

man Johan Johansen began canning crab on Seløy in 1949, and his factory operated until
1971. It provided work for many women, who had to boil, open, and peel the crabs before
packing them in airtight tins. Afterward, the cans were polished and labeled. Occasionally,
the women wrote small greetings to consumers on the back of the labels, despite being for-
bidden to do so. This story reaches its culmination when the audience sees an image of a
Christmas greeting written on the back of a can by a woman who signed her name as Alfhild
Måsvær in 1970. The next image is a letter the woman received from a crab paste buyer
from Melbourne, Australia, which was delivered in spite of multiple mistakes in the spelling
of her Norwegian name on the envelope. The fact that the card arrived testifies to the con-
ditions of a small Norwegian town and its reliable postal service – which took seriously its
duty to deliver mail – as the curatorial comment attests.
After being introduced to this object, one might ask: how does the narrative correspond
to the keywords women’s story, and how can it be integrated into women’s history in every
sense of the expression (in Norwegian, the word kvinnehistorie means both women’s history
and women’s story)? Is this information sufficient to tell women’s history? Is the intention
of Digital Museum to emphasize that women who worked in factories lived in small rural
communities in which inhabitants were well acquainted with each other, so that the hap-
hazardly spelled name of the intended recipient could not prevent a letter from finding its
way? Or perhaps Digital Museum planned to emphasize the naïveté, innocence, and
kindness of female factory workers who spent time so playfully. A digital story which
 Women’s History at Digital Museum 203

appears in the same cluster of objects explains that the 1960s and 1970s were the time of
the women’s labor movement, when females demanded decent working conditions and
equal pay for their work. However, poor working conditions lasted until 1970, when the
Norwegian Working Environment Act passed.
The story about women writing greetings on crab tins can be read as an example of
forgotten women’s history. In general, both the labor and feminist movements tend to
focus on workers’ lives and capital-work relations in major urban environments. The label
writing could also reflect women’s boredom with rote tasks and/or their sense of isolation.
Either way, the greetings scrawled on product labels can be interpreted as reflecting a wish
to tell the world about women’s often ignored role in the fishing industry. In spite of the
stereotype of coastal women as housewives, many held vital, albeit lower-level and unrec-
ognized, positions – first in family fishing enterprises, and later in larger fish processing
factories. As Åsa Elstad, author of Kystkvinner i Norge, or Coastal Women in Norway (2004,
my translation) points out, women were responsible for managing household animals,
completing domestic chores, and caring for children when the men were fishing. This
distinguished their lives from those of inland women, who shared more household
responsibilities with men (Elstad 2004, 5). During World War II, a technological revolu-
tion in the fisheries caused high demand for workers, and coastal women entered the
formal labor market, rendering an object like a crab tin reflective of the experiences of a
significant number of them. Thus, we have moved from a gender-neutral interpretation of
the object, in which a curator used the can to tell users about reliability of local postal
services back in 1970s, to a nuanced description of a significant but overlooked aspect of
the Norwegian women’s labor movement. The same object, when presented in different
curatorial constellations within the interface of Digital Museum, acquires a range of
meanings. This is another example of an “object multiple.” The original interpretation
renders it gender neutral; the second actively presents the development of women’s rights.
Searches within Digital Museum may thus begin an unpredictable and widening journey,
guided by curators and other users, who have an opportunity to supply extra information
about objects.

In her footsteps: Prominent women of the Oslo multicultural district Grønland

When using the keywords women’s story and Oslo, I retrieved a set of digital stories
produced by film artist Margarida Paiva that depict a multicultural city district named
Grønland. These digital stories are adaptations of cultural-historic walks in a neighbor-
hood known for its large immigrant population. In Norwegian media and mainstream
perceptions, the area is typically represented as “exotic,” because visitors see women
wearing veils, colorful fruit shops, and international cafés. In light of widespread negative
media coverage, Paiva, an immigrant from Brazil, was committed to showing me a less
well-known side of this multicultural district when we met for our interview. She
wished to offer stories that would yield a richer sense of the environment, in addition to
exploring migrant women’s experiences. In the interview, Paiva pointed out that
throughout the years distinguished women held strong positions in this area and stood
together to fight, help, and protect their families and those in need. Today, the Grønland
women’s community remains remarkably strong, Paiva underlines, and parallels can be
drawn between past and present.
204 Jana Sverdljuk

In one of the short films, called Teaterplassen, or Theater Square (my translation), Paiva
talks to her Iranian friend, filmmaker Elnaz, as she shows Theater Square in Grønland
(DigitaltMuseum 2014b). This is a popular meeting place with cafés and restaurants. The
Open Theater, which was established in the 1980s, formerly occupied a site that now holds
Dramatikkens Hus, a national center for developing performing arts. A statue of Anne-May
Nilsen (born 1939) stands there as well; a Norwegian actress of the 1920s, she founded the
Open Theater. We learn that Elnaz has just come from a three-month trip to Iran, where
she filmed a woman taxi driver, wanting to “present things in a new light,” and “tell stories
about people’s worth.” The young filmmaker wishes to destabilize the myth of oppressed
women of the East and to “build bridges, hoping that her colorful background can con-
tribute to something positive.” “We must start to relate to each other,” Elnaz says. “People
should feel valuable, and these values should be different from status, career, or material
things.” Talking to Elnaz as she sits on a bench in Theater Square is the best way to
commemorate Anne-May Nilsen, according to Paiva. The latter draws a clear parallel
between the woman who created the innovative theater and this open-minded, cosmo-
politan contemporary artist. In this case, the statue is transformed from a classical figure of
Norwegian culture into part of immigrant women’s history. By watching and listening to
Paiva’s other stories about prominent women in Grønland, we learn an alternative view of
this area: it was and is a vibrant site for immigrant women’s political and social activism; arts
and cultural activities; and volunteer and human rights organizations. Through the affor-
dances of digital storytelling and rich curatorial content, that is, a story about an Iranian
filmmaker, audiences discover new perspectives on the statue of a Norwegian artist and a
multicultural Oslo district. The new perspectives transform the meaning of the historical
object of a statue of a “native,” ethnically Norwegian artist, at the same time as it alters the
commonplace representation of the multicultural Oslo district. This digital story is an
example of how rich curatorial content provides new meaning to digitized cultural artifacts,
which in this case take the form of a historical square and statue.

Conclusion: (Non) experts’ willingness to participate

The extensive contributions of curators and community members who produced original
museum objects in digital formats have created vast opportunities to discover women’s stories.
Anne-Britt Gran and her colleagues from the project, “Digitization and Diversity: Potentials and
Challenges for Diversity in the Culture and Media Sector” (2018) conducted a survey of Digital
Museum users. A total of 249 persons answered. Most respondents were super-users who fre-
quently employed this digital service. They also had completed more higher education than
average. Men were slightly overrepresented; they were fifty-three percent of the respondents in
comparison to forty-seven percent, who identified themselves as women. The majority were
from thirty to sixty years old, with both parents born in Norway. Respondents lived in districts
and counties across Norway. The study also established that Digital Museum has been widely
used for individual inquiries into genealogy and local history (Gran et al. 2018). The bulk of
respondents did not work in the public sector, which means that survey participants were
unlikely to be museum or cultural workers.
According to the results, the vast majority of users completely agree with statements such
as “Digital stories make Digital Museum more interesting,” “Stories which present lived
experience enrich the nation’s memory, which Digital Museum represents,” and “Digital
 Women’s History at Digital Museum 205

stories made by persons with ethnic minority background enrich the nation’s memory,
which Digital Museum represents.” The answers further show that the majority of users
(61 percent) wish to contribute their own content by correcting information about
objects and submitting pictures, stories, exhibitions, or other materials (Gran et al. 2018).
A large percentage (35 percent) wish to post digital stories as well. Without a doubt,
projects encouraging submission of new objects, digital stories, comments, and metadata
should be carried out in future. In addition, the government should make a cultural
policy commitment to support projects designed to supply digital objects with metadata
sensitive to gender and ethnicity. This important change would demonstrate the full
scope and variety of digital cultural heritage. Norwegian authorities have assigned museums
and other cultural heritage institutions to assess the prospects for continuing the creation of
digital stories and supplying digital objects with additional metadata. However, policies
regarding gender-sensitive electronic curation have not been developed. At this time, the
question of whether museums would be willing to develop such policies and practices in the
absence of national guidelines remains open. The establishment of national gender, ethnicity,
and race-sensitive cultural policies may therefore determine the possibility of making digital
objects visible from the perspectives of vulnerable population groups.

Notes
1 This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (project number 247602), the
Programme on the Culture and Media Sector (KULMEDIA).
2 For those who are unfamiliar with this technical term, the Oxford English Dictionary defines an affor-
dance as “A property of an object or an aspect of the environment, especially relating to its potential
utility, which can be inferred from visual or other perceptual signals” (2018).
3 Here, the term enact is used in a technical sense, referring to “how … institutional factors such as
norms, values, perceptions, rules, routines, practices, and regulations shape the way information and
communication technologies are used, or come to be used” (IGI Global 2018).
4 In chapter 5, readers can learn about a digital cataloging project to provide access to more
information about the gendered associations of objects in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

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17
RECORDING CHANGE
Collecting the Irish Abortion Rights Referendum, 2018

Brenda Malone

Introduction
While the Western world has witnessed right-wing ideologies’ rise to renewed promi-
nence, Ireland has seen significant change in social attitudes, moving from religious and
social conservativism toward the left. On March 25, 2018, the Republic of Ireland held a
referendum for the nation’s citizens to decide whether to remove a 1983 amendment to
the Irish Constitution which stated: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the
unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its
laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right”
(Bunreacht na hÉireann 1937).
Commonly known as the Eighth Amendment, it constituted a reaction to the legalization
of abortion in Britain (1967) and the USA (1973). The Eighth Amendment was designed to
recognize the fetus’s right to life as equal to that of the pregnant woman; it made
abortion illegal even in cases where the pregnant person’s life was at risk. Perhaps more
significantly, it contributed to a distrust of women, who came to be seen as the most
potent danger to the life of the unborn. Subsequent legal cases created a situation where
over three thousand five hundred Irish women traveled abroad every year to obtain
abortions, whether for personal or medical reasons such as a fatal fetal abnormality.
Generations of Irish women campaigned against these laws with little success. The Irish
state had deep ties with the Catholic Church, and religious teachings permeated Irish laws
and life. The issue of women’s reproductive health and rights came to the fore again in 2012
with the high-profile death of a woman during a miscarriage, leading to contentious debate
at all levels of society.
The Eighth Amendment was overturned decisively by the 2018 referendum, liberalizing
abortion laws and allowing terminations of pregnancy up to twelve weeks, and after that
when there was serious risk to the pregnant person or a fatal fetal abnormality. The refer-
endum result indicated a significant move forward for Irish women’s reproductive rights and
illustrated the breakdown of the church and state model. Ultimately, it signaled Ireland’s
rupture with Catholicism as part of its national identity.
208 Brenda Malone

In this chapter, I will review the National Museum of Ireland’s practices for exhibiting
women’s history to provide context for the discussion that follows. My primary emphasis will be
on the museum’s involvement in collecting the material culture that emerged from this seismic
event in Irish history. The act of collecting this material exposed significant gaps in the collec-
tions, particularly in representations of women’s history, and it led to changes in policy and
practice at the NMI to allow curators to explore new ways of collaborating with citizens and
external organizations. Finally, I will discuss the lessons learned from this endeavor, new efforts
that have sprung from it, and its possible effects on future representations of Ireland’s identity in
the national museum.

Recording Irish women’s history – the National Museum of Ireland

In a reflection of the historical neglect of Irish women’s agency, the inclusion of females in
the NMI’s collections varies among museum departments. The material culture of prehistoric
Ireland is interpreted and displayed within the context of its discovery: artifacts are arranged
by archaeological site and described in gender-neutral words. Jewelry is termed adornment,
while tools, cooking utensils, and other household items are not categorized to conform with
modern gender stereotypes.
Conversely, artifacts in the folk collections (from the 1800s onwards) are highly gendered.
These collections are interpreted through historical documentation of the traditional roles of
males and females in nineteenth-century Irish society. Men are mainly associated with trades,
crafts, and agriculture, while domestic artifacts represent women’s roles in the family, the
home, household labor, and religious practice. Woman is presented as wife, mother, and
nurturer, managing family life and ensuring its survival through her efforts.
The development of the historical collections from the 1930s also suggests gendered
collecting. In 1932 Nellie Gifford-Donnelly (1880–1971) became the prime force in
building the NMI’s historical collections (Joye and Malone 2015). Gifford-Donnelly was
highly significant in the major political movements of the early twentieth century.
Although she was not a curator, she organized the first exhibition on the topic of Irish
independence, collecting and displaying artifacts ranging from important historical objects
to personal relics of male and female comrades. Other women of the period also con-
tributed: Grace Gifford-Plunkett and Kathleen Clarke deposited the personal effects of
executed husbands and brothers, and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington donated objects in memory of
her murdered husband. Despite playing a significant role in later politics, Sheehy-Skeffington,
like Gifford-Donnelly, deposited nothing to commemorate her own contribution. In contrast,
males tended to donate objects illustrating their own involvement. In displays, the traditional
male story was told, using guns, uniforms, and medals.
The recent history exhibition, Soldiers and Chiefs: The Irish at War and Abroad from 1550 to the
Present Day, required concerted efforts to draw out the female role and attract female audiences.
The traditional collection did not lend itself to telling this history – a common experience for
museum professionals working in the male-dominated area of war and military activity (Brandon
2010, 105–115). Consequently, the curators embarked on an active program of updating the
collections, using public appeals to achieve greater inclusivity. More generally, the NMI’s
twentieth-century historical collections maintained silence on women’s history after the
foundation of the Irish Free State, as the state itself did.
 Recording Change 209

Collecting the Repeal the Eighth campaign

Although I curate military history (among other subjects) at the National Museum, I recog-
nized the need to collect and record the Repeal the Eighth social movement when I took
part in the 2017 Women’s March for Choice in Dublin. The march represented a growing
grassroots women’s movement, both nationally and globally, at that time (especially follow-
ing Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the USA). The Irish movement had a par-
ticularly notable visual element. On the Yes side, the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth
produced textile banners that led the processions down the city’s main thoroughfare. One of
the lead artists, Alice Maher, asserted the importance of a strong visual presence: “When you
reclaim imagery, you take the power back. We’re also aware of them [the banners] being beau-
tiful objects, and our intent was that they would be gathered in a national collection and nobody
could say that we didn’t fight for our rights” (Saner 2018). Reminiscent of nineteenth-century
guild/trade union banners (see Charles Russell’s painting The O’Connell Centenary Celebrations,
1875),1 the new banners placed contemporary artists’ work in the continuum of Irish history.
This provided me with the opportunity to collect within my curatorial remit by acquiring a
selection of professional and homemade signs and related objects; I am also the curator of
flags and banners.
During the campaign, I analyzed all data coming to light related to the sex, gender, and
age of campaigners, as well as how urban and rural populations were predicted to vote.
Other elements were of even greater interest to me – the grassroots, feminist nature of the
campaign contributed to the production of vast quantities of beautiful and meaningful
material culture. I decided that representative objects should be collected so the museum
could exhibit this history fully in the future. The selected artifacts would tell the story of the
people and communities that made this change in Irish society.2
Apart from gathering general ephemera such as leaflets and badges during the campaign,
I began collecting in earnest the day after the referendum (Marshall 2018). At this point, I
was primarily concerned with acquiring posters from the main No campaigns, Love Both
and Save the Eighth. Using social media, I asked friends to help collect these posters, which
were being removed almost immediately. I then put out a national appeal through Twitter,
stating that the National Museum of Ireland was collecting banners from both sides of the
debate due to their prominence in the campaign. This elicited a huge response, and it
quickly became clear that individual and group campaigners strongly desired the recording
of this event by the National Museum. Soon I had a range of material to represent the
different stories of this event, a collection gathered by citizens through a network of
engaged people, managed by a curator.
Not every offer could be accepted, and items were acquired according to, for example,
geographical spread or individual and group protest, while aiming to avoid duplication.
Official campaign group posters illustrated the platforms on which the debate was founded
and different aspects of the campaigns. They also became the sole representations of the No
campaign, as no other banners or ephemera were found or offered to the museum. As
mentioned, banners were abundant on the Yes side, designed to be carried at marches or
hung on buildings and bridges. Some were professionally printed, for instance, those from
Together For Yes, an umbrella group for those favoring repeal. As the main successor to
previous abortion rights campaign organizations, Together for Yes connected many of their
participants with their millennial counterparts; the group had a strong emphasis on civil
210 Brenda Malone

society, and its text-based posters expressed compassion for women in crisis. Socialist
Feminist Movement ROSA (Reproductive rights, against Oppression, Sexism & Austerity)
was the only Yes group to use the image of Savita Halappanavar,3 the woman who died
after being refused an abortion during a miscarriage, so that was crucial to collect. Unfor-
tunately, I did not manage to collect the poster that used Savita’s image to call for a No
vote, claiming the Eight Amendment could have saved her. For all the posters I collected, I
meticulously recorded information, including their production details, donor, and the
location in which it was hung. In addition to the printed posters, the movement’s diversity
and creativity is illustrated by handmade banners, painted umbrellas, and artworks, pains-
takingly created by women as individuals and members of community groups. Beautifully
crafted items hark back to the historical visual culture of protest, and new designs such as
Maser’s iconic Repeal logo reflect stories of campaign controversies, such as the banning of
the artwork from publicly funded spaces (Holland 2018).
Unusual items included a black dress embroidered with slogans in colored yarn. It was
paraded on a mannequin to protest females’ lack of bodily autonomy, communicating anger,
determination, and humor. The dress was used to campaign in Donegal, the only con-
stituency to vote against repealing the amendment. Objects from around the country repre-
sent the movement’s presence not only in major cities but also in more traditional rural
communities. In the weeks after the referendum I traveled to the rural Irish Midlands to
collect the “Roscommon Farmers For Yes” family banner. This county voted no to marriage

FIGURE 17.1 Repeal banner, knitted by Anne Phalen, using the Maser Design
Source: National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Courtesy of the NMI.
 Recording Change 211

equality in 2015 and yes to removing the Eighth Amendment, and it is therefore a critical
vehicle for talking about change in social attitudes. It is also an example of the participation
of men, who campaigned for partners, family members, and friends. The painted cardboard
cut-out sheep is a favorite with colleagues as a form of folk art and poses a challenge for
conservation skills. Such homemade banners not only represent geographic spread, but also
different age groups, the veteran campaigners and the young newly active women, as well as
their different forms of protest, from art to music to performance and dance. One Limerick-
based dance group donated their costumes – black and white cut-out doll costumes with the
numeral “8” incorporated into their designs, worn at both protest marches and performances.
Some of the most moving material came from the Home to Vote and Be My Yes cam-
paigns in the UK and Ireland. These organizations provided young Irish citizens working
abroad with crucial information regarding their eligibility to vote and encouraged them to
make the journey home to vote and make Ireland a better place, as they had done in 2015
for marriage equality. One such organization, the London-Irish Abortion Rights campaign,
was key in the dissemination of information and raising awareness of the issue though
peaceful protest. Their 2016 March for Choice saw seventy-seven women (representing the
seventy-seven Irish women who traveled to England each week for an abortion) walking
through the streets of London with wheeled suitcases, eventually coming to a silent protest
outside the Irish Embassy. One of these suitcases is now part of the NMI’s Repeal collection,
a physical object to represent both the protest movement and the seventy-seven women who
could not otherwise be identified. These women’s airport signs and boarding passes reflect
the most recent Irish diaspora, the generation displaced by the economic bust of the last
decade. A vast collection of graphic pin badges also displays the range of those participating in
the debate, for example, rural and urban people, Men for Choice, and Grandparents for
Choice. The Together for Yes Dogs for Choice badge, given by our youngest donor so far,
made an interesting addition to the wealth of designs now in the collection.
It was essential to record the provocative imagery used, particularly evident in the No
campaign, which had more than sufficient funds for posters and the services of consulting
firms. These groups employed the same tactics used in the 2016 American presidential
election and Brexit campaigns to target certain demographics with Facebook and Google
ads; however, investigative journalists soon exposed the practice, and the advertisements,
allegedly illegally funded from non-Irish sources, were banned. Nevertheless, the No
campaign was noteworthy for using images of babies and fetuses, often saying “Please
Don’t Repeal Me.” Another poster depicted a young girl with Downs Syndrome with her
father, implying that mothers would abort these children in such numbers that it would
equate to genocide. Disability support groups condemned this manipulative approach. The
museum has acquired a multitude of No posters to reflect the quantity to be found across
the country and the different ways in which their messages were illustrated. These images
will require careful display in future exhibitions.
I did not succeed in collecting every object of interest, however. The US-based anti-abortion
Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (ICBR) took graphic imagery to the extreme, showing
photographs of dismembered fetuses at protests outside maternity hospitals and government
buildings (Curran, Fitzpatrick, and Loughnane 2018, 27), declaring that “no one can argue with
a photograph” (Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform 2018). The museum could not acquire
these posters due to the pop-up nature of the ICRB protests. However, I did acquire a rainbow
flag used by the group counter-protesting the ICBR, which represents members of Ireland’s gay
212 Brenda Malone

communities. Such flags were used to hide the ICBR’s distressing images from view (Braidwood
2018). Our newly formed collections network helped me connect with the young protester who
used and wore the acquired flag throughout the campaign. Significantly, his flag is the NMI’s
first acquisition that represents the Irish LGBTQ+ community.
Finally, the use of the Irish language by both sides required recognition in the collection.
The Yes campaign’s simple poster Tá (Yes) contrasted with the use of the Irish language on
the posters of the newly formed Abortion Never group, a branch of the far-right National
Party. Their posters read “Éagfaidh Leanaí Vótáil in Aghaidh,” with the English-language
posters reading “Babies Will Die – Vote No,” The Irish language is as tied to our national
identity as Catholicism has been, and this can be considered an appropriation of national
identity by both sides. The No side also repurposed nationalistic imagery on a poster refer-
encing the 1916 Rising and the Proclamation (which, ironically, promised equality to all
citizens), by using the image of three of the all-male signatories, and one mystery woman
whom historians have yet to identify. These aspects of the campaign serve as a warning
against allowing a constructed nationalist identity to dictate human rights in Ireland again.
With every donation, regardless of which side it represented or how it engaged with
national identity, I have had an opportunity to hear and record people’s motivations for
creating objects and participating in protests. This was truly a citizens’ movement, similar to
those recorded in chapter 18 on the People’s History Museum in Manchester. I took a
photograph of each donor to acknowledge the person behind the object and to file for the
future. I have often wished for similar information on artifacts in our two-hundred-year-old
collections, so I am thinking of the needs of my successors in this regard.

Moving into contemporary collecting

The initial surge of intense collecting of Repeal material lasted three to four weeks. Afterwards, it
was time to reflect on the process, assess its effectiveness, and consider how to conduct similar
collecting in future. The Repeal collection appeared to have grown to a point where it was
representative of the event and the people involved. When I further examined the motivations
of the object creators, and as analysis of the campaign and its results began to emerge, I found
gaps in the collection. For example, I recognized that despite collecting No campaign posters, the
voice of the Soft No, the less militant No voters, was missing. This is in part due to the fact that
this material culture was primarily produced by the campaign groups, and in some cases no offers
to donate were made. I will need to address this absence actively to promote balance and accu-
racy so the collection will fully reflect the national debate during the referendum.
More significantly, placing this event in the continuum of Irish history exposed addi-
tional gaps in NMI’s historical collections – the lack of material from the last century,
not just relating to women’s history but also to other civil rights movements such as
LGBTQ+ rights and civil rights in British-controlled Northern Ireland (The Troubles).
Attempts to collect artifacts from the 2015 Marriage Referendum were limited due to
staffing and resource issues, as well as institutional inertia. Consequently, the collection
was minimal and did not reflect the event’s importance. The year 2018 saw increased
staffing for the first time since the economic downturn, and I began actively pursuing a
policy of engagement to collect this material culture. As a result, an important new
donation is being acquired at the time of writing – the wedding dresses of Minister
Katherine Zappone and Dr Ann Louise Gilligan worn at their marriage ceremony in
 Recording Change 213

Dublin Castle in January 2016. Their wedding took place just months after the Marriage Act
2015 came into effect. Zappone and Gilligan had been a constant force in the struggle for
equal rights. Having married in Canada in 2003, they later took a case against the Irish
Government (Zappone & Gilligan v. Revenue Commissioners & Ors [2006]) to have their
marriage recognized under Irish law. Their actions were key to reigniting the equality
debate, which eventually led to the establishment of civil partnership rights, and later the
Marriage Equality referendum. As the wedding dresses become part of the NMI collections,
they will represent Zappone and Gilligan’s personal struggle for equal recognition. In a wider
sense, they also represent the Irish LGBTQ+ community’s struggle for equality and the Irish
nation’s story of social change.
Even though the NMI has a suite of collections and acquisitions policies, we had none
regarding the collection of contemporary materials related to current events and cultural
trends. I therefore found it difficult to justify certain acquisitions, especially if they proved
resource heavy – requiring conservation, transport, and storage. It became imperative to
develop policies that reflected new collecting efforts so we could provide appropriate
resources and thus facilitate acquisitions. A 2018 policy update has enabled me, together with
other curators and conservators, to act quickly to secure artifacts.

Filling the absence – The Magdalene laundry system

Collecting around the Repeal the Eighth movement and the resulting policy shifts have
served as models for subsequent efforts, such as the acquisition of a Magdalene laundry.4
In mid-2018, I was approached by a fellow heritage professional working with a group
seeking to commemorate the ten thousand women incarcerated in these laundries run by
religious orders from 1922 to 1996 (Justice for Magdalenes Research 2018). The initial
request was to examine a derelict Magdalene laundry site that was due for redevelopment
in order to salvage and preserve a representative sample of its contents. At the time of writ-
ing, this process is complete and plans for acquiring the objects are underway. The contents
of this particular laundry represent the physically demanding work of the women incar-
cerated there (represented by the machinery) and the site’s connections with state agencies, as
seen on the original labels on the laundry baskets. While the contents speak of the institution
and its scale, there is nothing left of the women themselves. I seek to remedy this absence
through working with Magdalene survivor groups; collaborating with subject experts; and
preserving survivors’ testimony. This collaboration will help us choose objects that will add
significance to the story told by the mass-produced laundry machinery. However, the
absence of the women’s material culture also speaks volumes about their lives in the laun-
dries – the stripping away of their personal identities and their almost complete removal from
society.
Remaining documentation of the Magdalene system lies in the hands of religious orders,
so it becomes increasingly critical that material culture is gathered and preserved by a publicly
owned cultural institution such as the NMI. Its acquisition will place a tangible record of this
history in the ownership of the state, where it can be protected and made available for
research and display. The material’s presence in the collections of the National Museum of
Ireland will lend gravitas to the history; as Gerard Koskovich (2014, 71) states, cultural respect
comes when a previously neglected history is honored in the traditional space of the
museum, increasing understanding, dignity, and equality.
214 Brenda Malone

Equally important is the preservation of the memories of the survivors who suffered in
these institutions. The fact that this history will be held in a national museum recognizes the
women’s suffering and validates their truth. We are learning from the experience of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington (Linenthal 2001); just as the Holocaust became a central
part of Jewish historical awareness, so has the systemic institutional abuse of women and
children moved from the periphery to the center of Irish national consciousness. Recognizing
that we must own our difficult histories and incorporate them into our national identity, I
intend to continue actively collecting appropriate material.

Conclusion
Curatorial bias is a major question to be debated in such efforts. In exhibitions on political
topics, the voice of the curator is perceived as the view of the institution (Arnold 1998, 191),
and visitors are quick to detect bias. In our case, while every attempt was made to ensure that
the Repeal collection represents both sides of the debate, the material culture of the Yes
Campaign, more personal and multifaceted in nature, remains more extensive. No material
was deposited by No Campaign members. I was a Yes voter, and although I attempted to
keep a professional distance in my role as curator, my beliefs and personal networks have no
doubt influenced the collection. This is not necessarily negative; in a museum context, it can
be positive and provocative for an exhibition to project a definable stance that elicits visitor
reactions and provokes engagement. Curators are also citizens, and it is necessary for them to
participate in society to understand and record it, using their professional expertise to balance
representations of historic events. The Irish public and future curators will determine how
successful this attempt has been.
In addition to providing a new model for gathering material culture, one of the most
important outcomes of the abortion rights campaign collecting effort was increased
participation from the Irish public. In suggesting and offering artifacts, citizen curators
engaged fully with their national museum, choosing material that represented them and
their experiences. The museum’s outreach instilled a sense of ownership and belonging.
This is a valuable relationship to build on in future, especially in terms of identifying
gaps in the twentieth-century collection and sourcing necessary objects. This relation-
ship is also a critical factor in determining the role of the NMI in Irish society today.
What we collect will be history for future generations – the economic boom and bust;
equal rights for all citizens, including the New Irish communities settling in the coun-
try; our housing and homelessness crisis; direct provision for asylum seekers; and a
reformed and contentious border after Britain leaves the European Union. In this way,
our institution will become more reflective of the public it serves, modeling timely and
proactive collection practices.

Notes
1 This painting, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, may be viewed at http://
www.bridgesofdublin.ie/gallery/view/the-oconnell-centenary-celebrations-1875.
2 Chapter 22 in this book also examines a community collaboration to collect material culture.
The Amsterdam Museum has a long history of such work, which has been evident in many
gender-related exhibitions, including one on prostitution.
 Recording Change 215

3 In October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a thirty-one-year-old woman, originally from India, died in
an Irish hospital of septicemia contracted on the seventh day of a miscarriage. She requested a ter-
mination when it was clear the pregnancy could not be saved. However, she was informed by
medical staff that until the fetal heartbeat stopped naturally, she could not be helped, because “this is
a Catholic country,” as stated afterwards by her husband Praveen during the official inquest. Halap-
panavar’s death triggered a huge national and international response, provoking vigils and protest
marches with the promise, “Never Again.”
4 Many women were incarcerated in Magdalene laundry facilities run by religious orders (both Pro-
testant and Catholic), where “fallen women” were sent to live and work to repent their transgres-
sions (Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen
Laundries 2013). In reality, women sent to laundries were likely to be those who simply did not
conform to the stereotype of a moral or pure Irish woman.

References
Arnold, Ken. 1998. “Birth and Breeding: Politics on Display at the Wellcome Institute for the
History of Medicine.” In The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, edited by Sharon
Macdonald, 183–197. London: Routledge.
Braidwood, Ella. 2018. “Ireland’s LGBTQ Activists are Covering up Graphic Anti-Abortion Images
with Rainbow Flags.” Pink News, May 17. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/05/17/ireland-lgbt-a
ctivists-anti-abortion-images/.
Brandon, Laura. 2010. “Looking for the Total Woman in Wartime.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Museums,
edited by Amy K. Levin, 105–115. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bunreacht na hÉireann. 1937. (Constitution of Ireland). Article 40.3.3. https://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/
eng/Historical_Information/The_Constitution/Bunreacht_na_hÉireann_October_2015_Edition.pdf.
Curran, Ann, Orla Fitzpatrick, and Fiona Loughnane. 2018. “I’m a Poster, Receive my Message.”
Source Summer: 24–27.
Holland, Kitty. 2018. “Project Arts Centre Told to Remove ‘Repeal the 8th’ Mural from Wall.” The
Irish Times, April 20. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/project-arts-centre-told-to-rem
ove-repeal-the-8th-mural-from-wall-1.3468694.
Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries.
2013. “Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with
the Magdalen Laundries.” http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013.
Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. 2018. “Why Images?” https://www.stopabortion.ie/.
Joye, Lar, and Brenda Malone. 2015. “Displaying the Nation: The 1916 Exhibition at the National
Museum of Ireland, 1932–1991.” In Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising,
edited by Lisa Godson and Joanna Bruck, 180–193. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Justice for Magdalenes Research. 2018. “About the Magdalene Laundries.” http://jfmresearch.com/
home/preserving-magdalene-history/about-the-magdalene-laundries/.
Koskovich, Gerard. 2014. “Displaying the Queer Past: Purposes, Publics, and Possibilities at the GLBT
History Museum.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1(2): 61–78. https://www.jstor.org/sta
ble/10.14321/qed.1.2.0061.
Linenthal, Edward T. 2001. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Marshall, Alex. 2018. “Posters, Banners, Boarding Passes: Museums Try to Get a Head Start on His-
tory.” The New York Times, June 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/arts/design/rapid-resp
onse-collecting-ireland-berlin.html.
Saner, Emine. 2018. “The Hateful Eighth: Artists at the Frontline of Ireland’s Abortion Rights Battle.”
The Guardian, April 12. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theguardian.com/artandde
sign/2018/apr/12/the-hateful-eighth-artists-frontline-ireland-abortion-rights-battle-eighth-amendm
ent&source=gmail&ust=1540989986887000&usg=AFQjCNF7AGx91qcTJS0QVKv0LloAfCaQFQ.
B. Problematic Narratives
18
NEVER GOING UNDERGROUND
Community Coproduction and the Story of
LGBTQ+ Rights

Catherine O’Donnell

Introduction
The history of LGBTQ+ activism in the UK is complex and wide-ranging, spanning cen-
turies of campaigning by individuals, groups, and organizations. There is no singular narrative
of linear progression: rights have been won and lost, while some remain contested. The story
must be told from multiple perspectives by voices that have often been silenced by oppres-
sion and prejudice. Therefore, while there are many effective ways museums can collect,
display, and interpret this history, an approach consisting of coproduction and partnership can
be particularly successful in representing a diverse and inclusive range of LGBTQ+ histories.
This case study documents Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights (NGU), a
project at the People’s History Museum (PHM) in Manchester, UK, in 2017. NGU marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts1 in England and Wales. The
project was wide-ranging, including multiple exhibitions and events, all created collaboratively
with communities and individuals. From my perspective as project manager, I will reflect on the
effectiveness of community-led, coproduced methods for researching, displaying, and interpreting
LGBTQ+ activist history, and I will share what I learned via a detailed analysis of the project.
NGU was the culmination of years of long-term partnership by PHM with LGBTQ+
communities. It engaged with over 11,600 program participants, with 51,943 people visiting
the main exhibition. Challenging and ambitious, the project represented a new approach for
the museum, which has become more outward-facing and collaborative in its programming.
For some coproducers, the project has been “life changing” (People’s History Museum
2018), while feedback from visitors and participants was highly engaged, emotive, and reso-
nant. NGU therefore offers a model for other institutions and their communities as they seek
to become more genuinely inclusive of previously marginalized voices.

Coproduction
NGU incorporated multiple methods of coproduction. I use this term to describe exhibitions and
programs that were created by PHM staff in partnership with other organizations or individuals.
220 Catherine O’Donnell

Coproduction goes beyond consultation; coproducers are active partners, making key creative
decisions and sharing ownership of the results. Simon (2010, 187) defines four models of partici-
pation: contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted. Much of NGU’s activity could be defined as
collaborative because visitors were “invited to serve as active partners in the creation of institutional
projects that are originated and ultimately controlled by the institution” (Simon 2010, 187).
Studies of community-coproduced exhibitions (including Fouseki 2010; Morse, Mac-
pherson, and Robinson 2013) highlight the challenges and conflicts of community colla-
boration. As Fouseki argues, “it is imperative that community consultation is replaced by
active negotiation and engagement that is aimed at shared power and ownership” (2010,
180). Lynch (2011, 20) identified “barriers to proper involvement” in museum engagement
projects that prevented communities from becoming active partners, resulting in “empow-
erment-lite.” These included “absence of strong, committed leadership and a strategic plan
for engagement” with “community partners treated as ‘beneficiaries’ rather than ‘active
agents.’” Lynch’s research fed into Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Our Museum resource (2016),
which advocates for organizational change to facilitate “genuine participation.” Closer to
home, NGU attempted to introduce meaningful power-sharing into PHM’s working prac-
tices, and thus to instigate organizational change. I use the term meaningful to describe activ-
ities and partnerships that are genuine, make participants feel valued, and have a lasting
impact on all coproducers. Sandell (2017, 63) further highlights that often LGBTQ+ projects
in museums “leave institutional practices, and the interpretation in permanent galleries, lar-
gely unchanged.” We wanted NGU to have a lasting impact on the organization, the
coproducers, and PHM’s collection.
From initial research with LGBTQ+ communities, we were conscious that much of LGBTQ+
history focuses on the experiences of white gay men. As Mills (2006, 258) notes, “If the T in
LGBT is a ‘fake T,’ it’s surely the case that the B is often even more vigorously supressed.” Fur-
thermore, Scott (2018, 20) argues that “to not be included on the walls of a museum is to be
rendered historically homeless.” We were therefore conscious that NGU must be inclusive and
diverse, incorporating a broad range of histories. This was one of the key reasons for using copro-
duction to deliver the project. We understood that to represent the wide range of backgrounds,
experiences, and opinions of queer activists fully, a single institutional voice would not be effective.
We also faced a lack of expertise within the organization (O’Donnell 2017), and we felt it was
important that a project about LGBTQ+ people should be led by members of that population.
Adopting an intersectional approach, one that acknowledges that museum structures can reinforce
systemic inequality for individuals experiencing multiple sources of oppression, was also key
(Thain-Gray and Patrick 2018, 11). Although the project focused on the fight for LGBTQ+ rights,
we also aimed to highlight the exclusion of (for example) people of color, disabled people, women,
and trans individuals from LGBTQ+ spaces, narratives, and histories. We further understood that
these individuals might not feel comfortable participating in the project. As Sandell (2017, 84)
argues, “museums’ interpretive practices must be shaped by an understanding of inequalities
beyond the institution.” We therefore actively approached organizations who work with these
excluded groups, such as Rainbow Noir and the Lesbian Immigration Support Group.

Initial steps
As the national museum of democracy, PHM collects, displays, and interprets over two hundred
years of British political and social history, focusing on the fight for the vote, the labor movement,
 Never Going Underground 221

as well as the stories of working-class and marginalized people. The museum’s mission statement
reflects its commitment to social justice by proclaiming the site the “home of ideas worth fighting
for” (People’s History Museum 2016b). Much of PHM’s story and collections focus on mino-
rities’ fights for equality; as an independent museum, PHM is in a unique position to tell difficult
stories without fear of resistance from government authorities, staff, or visitors. Sandell (2017, 63)
notes that many museum staff involved in developing LGBTQ+ projects have “encountered
constraints and challenges … and unprecedented levels of scrutiny by senior management,” but
this was not the case at PHM. The content of the project was supported across the organization.
The culture and ethos of the museum meant a large-scale LGBTQ+ project was a natural fit,
especially given its location in Manchester, which is home to an established LGBTQ+ commu-
nity. This insulated PHM from the kind of backlash against LGBTQ+ inclusion experienced by
more traditional organizations, such as the National Trust (Delingpole 2016).
NGU was an ambitious, multistrand project that would have been unachievable – even
inconceivable – if we had not fostered and nurtured relationships with LGBTQ+ com-
munities. Much of this work took place during Play Your Part (PYP; April 2013–March
2015), an experimental project funded by Arts Council England (O’Donnell 2016). It
aimed to make PHM more relevant to audiences by linking current events with past
campaigns to spark discussion and debate. PHM tested participatory methodologies of
audience engagement and proactively developed key collection areas by acquiring con-
temporary material.2 One strand of PYP involved connecting with LGBTQ+ communities
to collect, display, and interpret material related to bisexual, trans, and other gender and
sexual minorities, as PHM’s existing LGBTQ+ collections almost exclusively focused on
gay and lesbian campaigns. This initiative included co-curating a small display called Pride
in Progress? (August 16–September 1, 2013), developing an LGBTQ+ history tour of the
museum, and, after extensive consultation, redeveloping PHM’s permanent gay rights dis-
play to become a more inclusive LGBTQ+ rights exhibit (O’Donnell 2017). This work
included labeling gender-neutral toilets more clearly and training all staff in LGBTQ+
awareness. PYP was a catalyst for a more outward-facing model of working, and we
continued to program events with LGBTQ+ communities after its conclusion.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 presented an opportunity for
PHM to build on work done during PYP in both content and approach. While partial
decriminalization was only one step in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, the major national
anniversary provided an opportunity to tell a broader, more inclusive narrative. By linking
to the anniversary, we hoped to connect with cultural organizations doing similar work,
while maximizing opportunities for press coverage and reaching a wide audience. The
content reflected an intersectional approach, reaching back before the act while also
addressing contemporary concerns by focusing on LGBTQ+ activism. This connected most
closely with our collections and avoided duplicating other national projects that explored
facets of LGBTQ+ experiences, like the National Trust’s Prejudice and Pride and Tate
Britain’s Queer British Art (Sandell, Lennon, and Smith 2018), which is discussed in the
introduction to this book.

Project activities
NGU was supported by a grant of £63,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and it had four key
project partners: LGBT Foundation, The Proud Trust, Proud 2B Parents, and Manchester
222 Catherine O’Donnell

Lesbian and Gay Chorus. To facilitate partnerships across the region, we funded the Greater
Manchester LGBT Histories and Cultures Network. We wanted to expand and deepen the
relationships that had been built over the previous three years and use them as a basis for
partnering with LGBTQ+ communities on a high-profile, large-scale project.

Community-curated exhibition
Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights (February 25–September 3, 2017)
was a major exhibition coproduced by a team of nine volunteers, who were given the title
of Community Curator.3 They were briefed that the exhibition needed to focus on
LGBTQ+ activism, remain family-friendly, and be as diverse and inclusive as possible.
Within these parameters, the curators had full creative control over all aspects of exhibition
development, including research, object selection, narrative construction, and text writing.
They were fully supported by PHM staff, who attended meetings and delivered skills
development training. Curators also liaised with staff about key elements of the project,
including marketing, education, income generation, and design. This allowed the curators
to be involved with the wider work of the museum and for staff outside the core project
team to participate in the coproduction process.
We wanted Community Curators to represent a mix of ages, backgrounds, and experi-
ence levels in order for the volunteer team to learn from each other’s different perspectives.
We therefore advertised widely, via partner organizations and networks. We required no
qualifications other than a passion for LGBTQ+ history, an interest in learning about
exhibition development, and availability to help out for the project’s nine-month duration.
Community Curators were conscious that as a group they couldn’t represent the full
diversity of LGBTQ+ communities (for example, there was just one curator of color, and
one trans curator). They therefore conducted focus groups to obtain input on the content
from a wider range of people and consulted LGBT Foundation’s Trans Advisory Panel and
Rainbow Noir (a social and peer support group for LGBTQ+ people of color) on the
wording of exhibition text. There was low turnout at some of the focus groups, and we
should have worked more closely with partner organizations to encourage attendance,
perhaps by offering financial incentives.
For the process to be successful, it was vital that Community Curators worked well as
a team. We expected (and encouraged) discussion and debate, but it was important that
these were conducted respectfully. This commitment was reflected in the ground rules
the group wrote at their first meeting. Even so, at times one or two individuals domi-
nated conversations, and in retrospect the curators felt that the group dynamics, particu-
larly at the start, were difficult: “[we needed] more time together as a group to get to
know each other at the beginning.” One of these dominant personalities left after
clashing with other curators; we later learned that the person had made bi-phobic com-
ments to another curator. After that individual left, the “dynamic changed” and became
“more cooperative” (People’s History Museum 2018). If we were to run the project
again, we would hold dedicated initial workshops for members of the group to get to
know each other before we introduced the project itself.
Many Community Curators came from non-research backgrounds, and although they were
interested in LGBTQ+ history, they did not feel confident visiting archives before the project.
For them, participating in NGU brought them to institutions they had always wanted to visit and
 Never Going Underground 223

“gave [us] the right to go to places and find things out, that [we] wouldn’t have been able to do
as an ‘ordinary’ member of the public.” They discovered that the “feeling of privilege/excite-
ment of finding things was amazing” and now feel more confident using archives (People’s
History Museum 2018). Coproduction, therefore, can widen access beyond the partner
institution and facilitate engagement with other organizations.
Community Curators were divided over whether the exhibition should be structured
chronologically or thematically. Many felt that a chronological arrangement would “set up
an expectation that some issues are finished (like HIV activism) when they are still present,”
while others argued that a timeline would be more accessible for visitors (People’s History
Museum 2016a). The final exhibition was divided into six themed sections, together with a
timeline outlining legal milestones alongside little-known stories. Each section was named
after a slogan used in LGBTQ+ protests; these titles included “We’re here, we’re queer”
and “Silence = Death.”
The exhibition was challenging and inclusive; for example, a section on Pride marches
questioned whether the commercialization of Pride benefited everyone and included objects
from UK Black Pride and Trans Pride Brighton, two arguably excluded groups. We wanted
to show that community-led exhibitions could be high quality; thus the design drew themes
together with a strong visual identity and creative ways to engage visitors. These included a wall
explaining terminology (visitors could add their own terms), an area for reflection (where visitors
left messages for lost loved ones), and a wall where visitors could respond to questions about the
future of LGBTQ+ rights. In a limited way, visitors became coproducers, as their reflections and

FIGURE 18.1Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights exhibition. People’s History
Museum, Manchester, UK
Source: © People’s History Museum.
224 Catherine O’Donnell

opinions were woven into the fabric of the exhibition. Family-friendly interactives included a
puppet theater where visitors could create their own stories using gender-neutral puppets. A
wardrobe adorned with “Closets are for Clothes” contained the treasures of ordinary people who
had campaigned for LGBTQ+ rights. Visitors could learn about the people by handling these
objects. For example, a model of a bus illustrated the story of how activists and partners Geoff
Hardy and Peter Roscoe met (Thomas-Tielke 2017).

Supplementary exhibitions
As part of our commitment to the curators and their communities, we wanted to signal the
centrality of the exhibition to the museum and ensure that NGU was visible throughout the
building. In the museum’s main galleries, we hung banners used in LGBTQ+ protests and
placed NGU-branded labels next to permanent objects to draw attention to their queer
aspects. For example, we highlighted feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft’s relationships
with both men and women and how her writings on female sexuality informed later dis-
cussions on gender and sexuality. This created critical dialogues among objects, NGU, and
visitors around queer identity. Signage with LGBTQ+ protest slogans adorned the building
inside and out. A further three LGBTQ+ exhibitions were also displayed at the museum
throughout the year, which allowed PHM to present narratives complementary to NGU and
explore related topics in greater depth.
Continuum: Framing Trans Lives in 21st Century Britain (June 24–September 3, 2017) and
Queer Noise: The History of LGBT+ Music & Club Culture in Manchester (July 1–November 5,
2017) were selected by a panel of PHM staff and community members from twelve appli-
cations received via open submission. Continuum was curated by ArtMob and was one of the
first large-scale group shows in Britain dedicated to showcasing trans art. It featured the work
of fourteen trans and nonbinary artists and aimed to move “beyond the public scrutiny and
sensationalism surrounding our identities and bodies to show you who we are away from the
medical textbooks, daytime chat shows, and hate crime statistics” (Gardner and Bailey 2015).
Since transgender comprises one of the most marginalized and attacked demographics in the
queer community, we wanted to create a space in the program dedicated to trans voices.
This exhibition, which was visited by 16,538 people, generated a positive emotional response
from visitors and the participating artists. Exhibition curator Alex Gardner commented, “as a
group of people who have all felt somewhat powerless or hidden to varying degrees, we all
realised that our voices were being heard” (2017).
Queer Noise was curated by Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMA) and presented
photographs and ephemera of Manchester’s LGBTQ+ music culture and club life. MDMA
wanted to “invite queer people from across the generations to share their memories, pic-
tures, artefacts and stories – with the aim of constructing a fuller history of the city’s oft-
forgotten queer scenes and their wider influence upon British pop culture” (Savage 2017).
Queer Noise was a physical exhibition of a wider, crowdsourced online project and very
popular, visited by 37,772 people.
Both exhibitions were part of PHM’s regular program of “hosted” (Simon 2010, 187)
displays, for which the museum has minimal curatorial input, allowing communities to tell
their own stories. External curators are required to adhere to PHM’s display guidelines, and
the museum retains the right to veto objects or exhibits that may be dangerous, offensive, or
extremely upsetting to audiences. Even though many community exhibitions include
 Never Going Underground 225

political or sensitive material, PHM is very careful not to censor content; both exhibitions
required discussions between PHM staff and exhibition curators to find ways to display
potentially controversial objects. For example, we made the decision to include a banner in
Queer Noise titled “Common Queer Nigger Bitch” created by the radical queer art collective
Homocult in 1991. While the banner itself did not contain offensive language, its inclusion
in the exhibition meant that we would need to display the title on the caption. The large
banner powerfully depicts four faces (including three people of color) under the header
“HOMO,” with text stating, “You can’t stop us/Right to Love/Right to Live.” We felt it
important to include it because of Homocult’s significance in the Manchester LGBTQ+
music scene and the banner’s positive depiction of queer people of color. We ensured that
the curator contextualized the title in the caption text: “The title reflects the ‘four faces’ of
Homocult – the four oppressed communities the collective sought to represent.” This
context mitigated the risk of causing offense.
A third exhibition, Love is Not a Crime: 10 Years of the Lesbian Immigration Support Group
(April 15–June 25, 2017), allowed us to take a new approach to community exhibitions.
We wanted to target communities with whom we had not connected before; our practice
of giving guest curators full control tended to exclude those without prior experience in
cultural heritage projects. To engage a more inclusive range of voices, we decided to
contact groups directly and offer training and resources in exchange for their content
knowledge. We identified refugees and asylum seekers as underrepresented in our pro-
gramming, and we also wanted to explore global LGBTQ+ rights in more depth. We
therefore approached the Lesbian Immigration Support Group (LISG), which provides
practical and emotional support to lesbian and bisexual women applying for asylum in the
UK. The LISG display, viewed by 15,245 people, successfully raised awareness of the lack
of LGBTQ+ rights internationally, as well as of the difficulties individuals face when trying
to escape persecution. It was an important story to tell in a year that focused on historic
injustices, and it challenged the notion that all rights have now been won.
LISG is a small, volunteer-led organization that works with vulnerable women who
face detention and deportation. The exhibition was developed over a series of three
workshops with LISG members, who established the key themes: global LGBTQ+ rights;
the challenges that LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers face today; and the history and
activities of LISG. The initial contact and planning were mediated through the group
leader, and it was sometimes challenging to arrange dates and times for workshops due to
the complex situations of participants. Ultimately, we lacked sufficient time to build the
strong relationships we all wanted and were unable to offer as many skills development
workshops as we had initially hoped. Our time for developing the exhibition was also lim-
ited, because the dates had been set prior to contacting the group. Finances were compli-
cated as well because we were not permitted to cover participants’ expenses up front;
instead, they had to pay for travel and then seek reimbursement, which was difficult because
UK asylum seekers receive only £37.75 per week and are not allowed to work.
In reflecting on the project, I am conscious of the emotional labor LISG participants put
into the exhibition and the power imbalances this may have caused. For instance, the Home
Office requires LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to “prove” their sexuality, which is sometimes
achieved by participating in cultural associations’ projects, like the LISG exhibition, in which
members share private and traumatic stories. The PHM display was deeply personal, and the
opening night included emotionally charged speeches from LISG members expressing the
226 Catherine O’Donnell

group’s importance to them. The exhibition thus shone a spotlight on a valuable organization
and offered visitors information about how to support it. PHM intends to develop this
cocuration model further in partnership with community organizations, allowing time for
relationships to develop and for groups to set their own collaboration parameters.

Public programs
It was crucial that NGU be accessible to visitors of all ages, so we developed programming
for audiences including families, school groups, and adults, which engaged with 9,589
people. PHM’s Learning Officer worked closely with Matt Taylor-Roberts from Proud 2B
Parents (P2BP) to develop a family events program and create interactive elements in the
main exhibition. Together, they identified three engaging and challenging themes: identity,
family, and equality. Consultation workshops with P2BP families allowed them to test ideas
and shape the program.
As a result of this strategy, visitor figures for family events dramatically increased from
the previous year. Activities included art workshops, storytelling, and music making. A
particularly popular example was making Molly Spoons, wooden dolls that patrons of
Renaissance London Molly Houses (meeting places for gay and trans people) used to
represent their alter egos. We also made connections with LGBTQ+ artists, including Olly
Pike and Paul Harfleet, who had personal experience with themes and issues discussed in
the workshops and could also provide positive role models. Each session encouraged chil-
dren to question and challenge contemporary ideas of normalcy and to celebrate their
individual identities. Whenever possible, workshops took place in the exhibition space to
connect children with the objects.
In a time when hostility and a lack of understanding still affect many communities,
NGU offered an opportunity to raise awareness and celebrate diversity. This was parti-
cularly significant for young people who are at critical ages for developing opinions and
understanding the world. The program further allowed youth who were raised by
LGBTQ+ parents or who identified as LGBTQ+ to connect to their history, feel proud
of their identities and backgrounds, and meet people like themselves. A family attending
the launch day noted on a comment card that “it was lovely to be around other
LGBTQ families.” Other visitors highlighted the impact on young people: “I wish I’d
have had this as a child growing up in the 80/90s with lesbian parents, confused and
secretive. Now … feeling optimistic for the next generation” (NGU Comments Book
2017). The consistently strong partnership with P2BP organizers helped the museum to
engage with people who would not traditionally visit, diversifying its audience. In
exchange, we were able to offer P2BP a platform to promote the organization, which is
a relatively unknown but vital asset to the community.
For school audiences, we worked with The Proud Trust (2017) to develop LGBT History
Month 2017: Citizenship, PSHE and Law Education and Resource Pack. The three-lesson pack
explored LGBTQ+ history and changes to the law in the UK, as well as the situation for
LGBTQ+ people across Europe. It aimed to stimulate young people’s thought about changes
that still need to happen and ways they can raise awareness.
We planned to develop a completely new school workshop in consultation with teachers and
The Proud Trust; however, due to staff shortages within PHM’s learning team, we decided
instead to develop self-guided resources and tailor an existing workshop to the themes of the
 Never Going Underground 227

exhibition. The artist-led Art of Protest workshop explored historic and contemporary resistance
art, with participants responding to objects from the exhibition to design their own protest art.
We offered free sessions and coach travel for schools that had not visited the museum before,
including groups that were outside mainstream education, such as a pupil referral unit (PRU) and
a home educators group. One teacher commented, “Many students and teachers … find issues
around gender identity and sexuality difficult to access and deliver. The resources on display
made this easy. It was interesting and above all positive – prompting great questions from the
young people. The PHM exhibition is an invaluable resource for people who are questioning
their identity or coming to terms with acceptance of LGBT+ issues in their friendship circles and
families” (People’s History Museum 2018).
Anecdotal evidence suggested that some teachers did not feel comfortable taking their
students into the exhibition; they requested not to enter the display when visiting. The
project would have benefited from initial exploratory work with teachers to examine their
attitudes toward teaching LGBTQ+ history and issues as well as other constraints they might
have faced. If we ran the project again, we would offer professional development workshops
to give teachers confidence to guide students through the exhibition.

Impacts and power sharing

The project increased the number of LGBTQ+ activist objects in PHM’s collections from 115 to
150 after PHM approached lenders requesting items. Donations included objects related to
LGBTQ+ parenting, asexual activism, and transgender rights, all previously underrepresented or
absent from the collection. Intersectionality was highlighted with the acquisition of postcards
produced by the Disabled Lesbian Group in the 1990s and a handmade Black Lives Matter poster
carried at Manchester Pride in 2015 by Rainbow Noir. Several individuals who donated material
reiterated the importance of having a permanent record of the exhibition and increasing the
presence of LGBTQ+ history in the museum’s collection. By acquiring from living donors, we
have been able to include more context than in the past. Formerly, people were often closeted,
so their possessions were donated posthumously or anonymously. In other cases, queer associa-
tions were not catalogued with objects. In National Museums Liverpool’s (2018) Pride and Pre-
judice project, for example, curators had to research existing collections to identify objects with an
LGBTQ+ connection.
In our case, Community Curators were essential to accessing material. Their activist
backgrounds allowed them to establish relationships with lenders that were further developed
by the museum. Once trust in the museum was established, lenders were frequently happy to
donate personal objects. Accessioning material was thus a vital, permanent part of the pro-
ject’s legacy, one that has given donors a lasting voice. It will be important for PHM and
Community Curators to continue their partnership for collections, interpretation, and
acquisitions that benefit both parties.
PHM also updated the terminology describing LGBTQ+ objects in its collections management
system. This included adding to the existing terms (lesbian and gay) other identifiers such as queer
and nonbinary. This change was made to reflect the terms’ use in wider society and to aid the public
in database searches, breaking down the invisibility that has plagued LGBTQ+ communities.
Clearly, even as the project had positive effects on the institution, it had a significant impact on
visitors, cocreators, and community organizations. The response to the project by visitors was
overwhelmingly positive, with comments including, “Really wonderful I learned so much + feel
228 Catherine O’Donnell

empowered, challenged + inspired by that new knowledge” (NGU Comments Book 2017).
One of the major themes was that LGBTQ+ people felt represented: “that was the first time I
ever felt my experience reflected back at me in a museum. The People’s History Museum is now
the one and only museum I like. I really didn’t expect it to be so inclusive” (Tolu 2017). The
exhibition was also praised for being diverse: “An incredible display which was not only able to
outline the struggles of the LGBT+ communities, something which everyone should be aware
of, but it also depicted the diverse, fluid, and intersectional nature of the community itself in an
inclusive and effective manner” (NGU Comments Book 2017). When feedback was critical, it
still engaged with the content of the exhibition. Viewers asked for more representation of par-
ticular issues, with a number of comments criticizing a “lack of bisexual visibility.” In other
words, criticism suggested not that the exhibition itself was conceptually flawed, but that it
should have gone further.
The impact of the project on Community Curators, project partners, PHM staff, and volun-
teers was considerable. These cocreators were surveyed before and after the project and asked to
rate their knowledge of LGBTQ+ history on a scale of one to ten. On average, co-creators rated
themselves 6.9 before the project, increasing to 8.39 afterwards. LGBTQ+ awareness training
provided by The Proud Trust was key to building confidence and helping individuals to acquire
and employ unfamiliar terminology. Community Curators developed knowledge, skills, con-
fidence, and belief in their own abilities; many are planning on further study or careers in the
sector. The project has also reinvigorated their activism; for example, one curator spoke of
“Chechen concentration camps – somebody should be doing something about it – is it the
project’s job to nurture activists?” The Community Curators feel more engaged with their
communities, and they continue to be involved with PHM. Their reactions are best summarized
by the curator who described the process as “an intense but joyful experience” (People’s History
Museum 2018).4 Project partners were also positively affected by NGU. For example, P2BP
reported an increase in membership as a result of heightened awareness of the organization. In
addition, P2BP has continued its relationship with PHM by organizing museum mornings for
those who have just become parents.
The continuing impact of the project for the institution, its volunteers, and partners sug-
gests that it might serve as a model for other museums. From this perspective, it is crucial to
understand the extent to which power was shared. Community Curators made the final
content decisions and shaped the exhibition. However, they were working within parameters
of a project created by PHM. True power-sharing would have involved LGBTQ+ com-
munities in setting the aims of the project, shaping the funding application, and actively
monitoring the success of the project. We could not ask too much because Community
Curators were unpaid volunteers working alongside paid staff, which created another power
imbalance. One of Heritage Lottery Fund’s (HLF) “Outcomes for People,” against which
grant applications are measured, is that “people will have volunteered time” (2017, 6). This is
incorporated into the project budget as “non-cash contributions.” Skilled labor is given a
financial value of £150 per day (27). The Community Curators volunteered the equivalent
of 334 days, which equated to £551,100 of “support in kind” – over six times the total cash
expenditure of the project. While we required no prior experience and viewed Community
Curator positions effectively as a development opportunity because we offered training and
support, if I were to run the project again, I would advocate for Community Curators being
remunerated. There is an irony in the HLF outcomes that claim to be “for people,” even as
project organizers are encouraged to rely on unpaid labor.
 Never Going Underground 229

Conclusion: Organizational change

NGU had a major impact on PHM as an organization and has shifted how it works, becoming
more outward-facing and collaborative in its programming. However, this was not always a
smooth process. Some staff resisted this new way of working (but not the LGBTQ+ content).
The initial project plan was conceived and written by a small core team. To achieve buy-in
across the organization, more staff needed to be involved from an earlier stage.
Visitor numbers in 2017–2018 increased by over 15% to the highest ever in the museum’s
history. This reflected the profile-raising nature of the project and deepened engagement
with communities. In fact, we found coproduction to be an effective method for researching,
displaying, and interpreting LGBTQ+ activist history. We have learned that this approach
requires time, patience, and communication, but can create meaningful engagement with
complex histories. We would recommend that other institutions involve communities from
the outset, designing projects with them, not for them, and ensuring that a diverse and inclusive
range of voices are part of the conversation. With any project like NGU, the challenge for the
museum is to continue the work and maintain relationships to ensure the project’s legacy. This
is particularly important when people and partners volunteered so much. PHM is committed
to continuing to work with LGBTQ+ activists who campaign for an equal world.

Notes
1 Taking place in private between two males over the age of twenty-one.
2 See chapter 17 for another example of acquiring material related to current campaigns.
3 Adrian Smith, Heather Davidson, Jenny White, Kirsty Jukes, Kirsty Roberts, Lu Tolu, Sarah
Wilkinson, Stephen M. Hornby, Vivien Walsh.
4 For another example of an exhibition that involved community members from different groups, see
chapter 22.

References
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December 22. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4057118/Preserve-National-Trust-s-achin
gly-right-says-James-Delingpole.html.
Fouseki, Kalliopi. 2010. “‘Community Voices, Curatorial Choices’: Community Consultation for the
1807 exhibitions.” Museum and Society 8(3): 180–192.
Gardner, Alex J., and Louis Bailey. 2015. “Projects.” https://www.artmob.co.uk/projects.
Gardner, Alex. 2017. Personal communication with the author.
Heritage Lottery Fund. 2017. Our Heritage: Application Guidance. London: Heritage Lottery Fund.
Lynch, Bernadette. 2011. Whose Cake Is It Anyway? A Collaborative Investigation Into Engagement and
Participation in 12 Museums and Galleries in the UK. London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Mills, Robert. 2016. “Queer is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Histories and Public
Culture.” History Workshop Journal 62: 253–263.
Morse, Nuala, Morag Macpherson, and Sophie Robinson. 2013. “Developing Dialogue in Co-produced
Exhibitions: Between Rhetoric, Intentions, and Realities.” Museum Management and Curatorship 28(1):
91–106.
National Museums Liverpool. 2018. Pride and Prejudice – LGBT+ Research Project. http://www.liverp
oolmuseums.org.uk/collections/lgbt/pride-and-prejudice/index.aspx.
NGU Comments Book. 2017. Manchester: People’s History Museum.
O’Donnell, Catherine. 2013. “Pride in Progress?” [blog], August 19. https://phmmcr.wordpress.com/
2013/08/19/pride-in-progress/.
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O’Donnell, Catherine. 2016. “Play Your Part: From Audiences to Activists.” In Museum Participation:
New Directions for Audience Collaboration, edited by Kayte McSweeney and Jen Kavanagh, 392–409.
Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.
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History in Museums 41: 67–76.
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People’s History Museum. 2016a. NGU Development Meeting Minutes.
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ple’s History Museum.
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Sandell, Richard. 2017. Museums, Moralities and Human Rights. London: Routledge.
Sandell, Richard, Rachael Lennon, and Matt Smith, eds. 2018. Prejudice and Pride: LGBTQ Heritage and
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19
CURATING GERTRUDE STEIN: IDENTITY
POLITICS IN THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Hayden Hunt

Within the history of Modernism, few individuals evoke early twentieth-century Paris
like Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), the American writer and art collector. She successfully
navigated crosscurrents of artistic and literary cultures, assembling a formidable collection
of masterpieces by avant-garde artists while introducing the public to the milieu of
Picasso and Matisse in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. As a lesbian who upended
social expectations by subverting gender norms and enjoying a long-term domestic
partnership with Toklas, Stein has received critical attention from feminist and queer literary
scholars for decades. Yet art historians and curators have only recently acknowledged the
significance and impact of Stein’s sexuality, and, more generally, her queerness.
Stein and her contributions to visual culture have been the subject of four major exhibi-
tions since 1951. However, Stein’s sexual orientation was not addressed until two 2011
exhibitions in San Francisco, and even then, only partially. Although the four exhibitions
were temporally and geographically specific, each was accompanied by a catalogue to
help readers see how the art functioned in, contributed to, and circulated within broader
society. The museum or art gallery, and by extension the exhibition catalogue, is fre-
quently a space where viewers are presented not only with images of art objects, but also
instruction on how to interpret them. As Mary Kelly asserts, “Artists generally maintain
that the catalogue is more important than the exhibition itself. It gives a particular per-
manence to temporary events, an authenticity in the form of historical testimony” (2009,
353). With respect to Stein, exhibitions and their catalogues have been responsible for
mitigating, and in many ways defining, her sexuality. The fundamental differences among
the publications reflect evolving understandings of gender and sexual difference, as well
as curatorial practices aimed at making Stein – as a queer subject – more accessible for
heteronormative publics. Kelly argues that “the catalogue constructs a specific reading,
opens the space of a possible reworking or perhaps effects a closure; but it always has
definite political consequences” (2009, 352). I am interested in these political con-
sequences and, specifically, how catalogues construct images of Stein’s sexuality and
queerness that reflect museums’ ideological investments.
232 Hayden Hunt

Throughout this chapter, I use queer to describe aspects of Stein’s life, as I understand
them from letters, photographs, portraits, and her own writing. Queer theory acknowl-
edges “the instability of all gender categories” in contrast to “stable identity categories”
such as heterosexuality or homosexuality, though these categories are unstable, too
(Escudero-Alías 2009, 202). Although Stein and Toklas lived semi-openly as lesbians,
aspects of Stein’s identity beyond sexuality also evince queerness. For instance, Stein’s
masculine gender performance, such as her style of dress or her hetero-performative
relationship with Toklas, are encompassed by the term queer. As Chris Coffman explains,
Stein “goes well beyond ‘questioning’ heteronormative configurations of gender and
desire to mobilize a constantly shifting transgendering that radically reworks gendered
embodiment” (2017, 8). It is ironic that for Stein to perform masculinity depends upon
maintaining the traditional masculine and feminine roles of a heterosexual relationship.
As public spaces where gender is performed, museums retain a precarious relationship with
such “nonnormative” identities. In the case of Andy Warhol, Jennifer Doyle has observed
that many exhibitions/catalogues exclude biographical details that might raise questions
regarding his sexuality, despite the fact that homoerotic imagery appears throughout his
oeuvre (2009, 392). We see a similar trend with Stein, as the earliest exhibitions dedicated to
her art collection exclude any mention of her relationship with Toklas.
The first exhibition designed to cement Stein’s status as a preeminent art collector and
patron, Pictures for a Picture of Gertrude Stein as a Collector and Writer on Art and Artists
(1951), was organized by the Yale University Art Gallery in conjunction with the Bal-
timore Museum of Art. Yale’s Beinecke Library began receiving Gertrude Stein’s archives
in 1937, with the final accumulation of material arriving after her death in 1946 (Burns
2011, 260). This exhibition’s stated goal was to reunite works that once graced the walls
of the Paris home Stein shared with Toklas. By all accounts, the exhibition was suc-
cessful, and Toklas later praised the exhibition’s catalogue as an “illustrated … history of
27 rue de Fleurus” providing an “excellent introduction and notes” about the collection
(Toklas 1973, 223).
In the catalogue’s preface, Lamont Moore, then Associate Director of Yale University Art
Gallery, expressed gratitude to Stein for choosing Yale as recipient of her archive and selected
artworks. The catalogue features little biographical information, focusing instead on “Miss Stein’s
own writing and thinking concerning the visual arts” in order to “reveal her in her secondary but
important role in cultural history, [as] a patroness of the arts, a champion of certain phases of art
which she saw created in her own lifetime, and [as] a profound thinker concerning the art of
painting” (1951, 6). Moore states that Stein’s tumultuous relationship with her brother, Leo,
who was instrumental in assembling the collection early on, is beyond the scope of the exhibi-
tion (6). Additionally, there is no mention of Toklas’s role in managing the collection following
Stein’s death. The catalogue does not describe how the exhibition was organized in each loca-
tion, nor whether archival material was on display. Instead, it focuses on Stein’s taste in art and
the ways it manifested in her collection and writings on aesthetics.
In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) organized Four Americans in
Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family, which explored Stein’s art collecting habits
in relation those of her brothers, Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife Sarah. John Hightower
explains in the catalogue that the museum took a different approach to surveying the Stein
family’s collections than it had for previous single-collection exhibitions, where “the emphasis
has been on the works shown rather than upon the collecting activities or personalities of their
 Curating Gertrude Stein 233

owners” (1970, 8). While Pictures for a Picture did not describe Stein from a biographical per-
spective, MoMA staff (perhaps emboldened by the fact that the Stein siblings were deceased)
dealt heavily in salacious details surrounding the family. As Hilton Kramer noted in reviewing
the exhibition, its “appeal is a little like an old-fashioned novel, one of those family chronicles
boasting a complex plot, vivid characters, sharp conflicts, and a denouement in which all the
themes are capitulated and resolved” (1970, 85). Yet mention of Stein’s relationship with Toklas
is noticeably absent from the details of her many relationships.
The catalogue for Four Americans (1970) details Leo Stein’s life as an intellectual, painter,
and art collector; the development of her brother Michael’s collection of popular Chinese
and Japanese objects; Gertrude’s supportive relationships with artists such as Juan Gris, Henri
Matisse, and Pablo Picasso; and the friendship between the Stein siblings and Etta and Clar-
ibel Cone, who assembled an impressive collection of works under the early guidance of Leo
and Gertrude Stein. The next section of the book features archival photographs of the resi-
dence at 27 rue de Fleurus as it appeared between 1906 and 1915. Captions identify specific
paintings hung salon-style on the walls of Stein and Toklas’s home, as well as the paintings’
current locations. The catalogue concludes with a selection of plates depicting works from
the Stein family’s collections that were included in the MoMA exhibition.
In other words, the catalogue for Four Americans emphasizes Stein’s relationships with indi-
vidual artists and the Parisian avant-garde in general, yet Toklas is absent overall. This is curious
considering that in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein affirmed that her relationship with
Toklas figured prominently following her separation from her brother Leo in 1913. An early
passage makes clear that a quasi-marital relationship developed: “Before I decided to write this
book [on] my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The
wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not
wives, of geniuses who were not real geniuses” (Stein [1933] 1990, 14). Although Stein never
explicitly identifies Toklas as her lover, this excerpt communicates that Stein perceived Toklas’s
role to be analogous to that of male artists’ wives.
In “Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” Anna Conlan addresses the depiction
of Stein and Toklas’s relationship in the history of exhibitions related to Stein. Conlan
argues that museum exhibitions routinely erase “vast areas of human experience,” such as
same-sex relationships, by rendering them “unintelligible” or insignificant (2010, 257).
Toklas’s limited inclusion in the Four Americans catalogue problematizes the text further.
Specifically, Toklas is shown seated across from Stein, surrounded by works from their
collection, in a photograph in Leon Katz’s section, “Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein.”
Physical distance between the women suggests a lack of intimacy, obscuring the nature of
their relationship. Toklas appears only once more in the catalogue, when Margaret Potter
notes, “On her death in 1946, Miss Stein had left custody of her cherished collection of
paintings to her companion of forty years, Alice B. Toklas” (1970, 10). Potter’s use of
companion can be read as a veiled reference to a same-sex relationship and reflects the
adoption of complex codes that queer communities have used for centuries.
The MoMA exhibition gestured at inclusiveness and the women’s liberation movement by
emphasizing female contributions, but it stopped there. Specifically, the exhibition catalogue
recognized Michael’s wife, Sarah, for her role in developing their collection. More generally,
the catalogue described Stein as fulfilling traditional gender roles – like becoming a mother
figure to young authors and artists, including Picasso: “Gertrude was to watch Picasso with
the closest attention, worrying over his shifts of moods and what she thought of as his
234 Hayden Hunt

betrayals of his real self. Her notes betray her anxiety as she watches him skirt the traps of his
temperament” (Katz 1970, 56). She is also described as a caring sister, despite the growing
distance between the three siblings as Stein’s relationship with Toklas progressed. Toklas’s
comparative absence from the exhibition, save for a single photograph, speaks to Conlan’s
argument that museums are often complicit in the erasure of homosexuality from art history.
In the 1970s, when Four Americans appeared, “both lesbian and gay male cultures
reached new levels of visibility and cultural inventiveness” (Lord and Meyer 2013, 305).
Could a major art museum like MoMA, beholden to a primarily normative public, have
approached Stein from a queer perspective? Elaine Heumann Gurian argues that while
exhibitions reflect the biases and concerns of curators, they also reflect curators’ attitudes
toward their expected audiences. MoMA was founded with the stated mission of becoming
“the greatest museum of modern art in the world,” one that “aspire[d] to be an establish-
ment [organization],” and therefore, according to Gurian, was likely to “drift towards the
right” (1991, 178). This circumstance mitigated against openness about Stein’s sexuality.
The two exhibitions discussed above, which obscured Stein and Toklas’s relationship,
contrast with more recent exhibitions that attempted to acknowledge the women’s
sexuality and gender expressions with mixed success. In 2011, Stein was the subject of
two major exhibitions in San Francisco that studied her from somewhat complementary
historical perspectives. The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant Garde
opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to the Grand Palais
in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This major re-evaluation of
the Stein family’s contributions to the arts provided extensive documentation on over
five hundred works known to have passed through their collections. The exhibition built
upon the general framework of the 1951 and 1970 exhibitions, providing additional
information relating to the artwork, though, arguably, it was not radically different in
terms of its exhibition format.
The catalogue is divided into sections focusing on Leo, Sarah and Michael, Gertrude and
Toklas. Multiple essays explore each sibling’s role as an art patron and collector, while
“Alice Toklas and the Gertrude Stein Collection, 1946–1967” by Edward Burns (2011,
259–265) provides a history of the couple’s art collection and archives following Stein’s
death. By placing Toklas’s name first and acknowledging her role in assembling and
managing the collection, Burns acknowledges the pair’s relationship: “the affirmation Alice
gave to Gertrude’s writing and their commitment to each other were thus crucial to Stein’s
life as a writer” (259).
Picasso’s portrait of Stein, created in 1906, was a key piece in The Steins Collect, having
also appeared in the 1951 and 1970 exhibitions. Since Stein’s bequest to the Metropoli-
tan Museum in 1946, Picasso’s portrait has served to establish the author and collector’s
reputation within the museum’s institutional context, even as her appearance reflects
Stein’s countercultural and queer persona. It depicts Stein in a dark room wearing mas-
culine clothes; although a young woman when the work was painted, she appears much
older in terms of her physical appearance and bodily demeanor as she leans toward the
viewer with an imposing masklike gaze.
Since Picasso’s portrait hung in a domestic environment for nearly forty years, catalogue authors
have sought to re-contextualize it by evoking the original setting. The Steins Collect catalogue places
the image alongside other artworks that Stein collected and attempts to situate it by blending a
variety of primary, critical, and visual resources. For instance, Cécile Debray moves beyond
 Curating Gertrude Stein 235

FIGURE 19.1 Gertrude Stein sitting on a sofa in her Paris studio, with a portrait of her by Pablo Picasso
Source: Wide World Photos, 1930. Library of Congress collection.

accepting Stein’s narrative of the work in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was reprinted in
the Pictures for a Picture catalogue. Noting the loss of the image’s original context, Debray explains:
“We will never know what they [Picasso and Stein] said to each other during these sessions, full of
the sound of poetry … but it would seem that something momentous occurred for both of them”
(2011, 224). Picasso’s portrait occupies only one part of Debray’s essay, though she elevates it to a
mythical status, characterizing its creation as an event “with repercussions for their pictorial and lit-
erary endeavors” (224). Yet the glorification of Picasso’s role in creating the portrait diminishes
Stein’s agency as the author of her own story, presenting but one possible interpretation of the work.
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories opened concurrently with The Steins Collect. Held at San
Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, it later traveled to the National Portrait Gallery at
the Smithsonian. According to its catalogue, this exhibition aimed to create an “in-depth portrait
of Stein that knits together many of her identities” by using artwork, photographs, and material
objects to place her in “the larger context of her visual world” (Sullivan and Wolf 2011, viii).
The catalogue is grounded in queer and feminist studies, acknowledging Stein’s homosexual
relationship with Toklas and the ambiguous yet subversive aspects of her gender performance.
The structure of the catalogue, however, reflects an effort to impose particular interpretations
by categorizing Stein’s self-performances. The first part, “Picturing Gertrude,” explores her
appearance in portraits by artists she befriended. It is subdivided into five sections: “Family,”
“Coming of Age,” “Bohemian Stein,” “Matron Stein,” and “Imperial Stein,” and features works
by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Félix Valloton, and Francis Picabia. Additional sections include
“Domestic Stein” and “The Art of Friendship.” The development of Stein’s celebrity persona,
236 Hayden Hunt

reinforced through her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and tour of the United States fol-
lowing its publication, are detailed in “Celebrity Stein.” The author, Wanda Corn, explores
Stein’s posthumous reputation and the development of her queer persona in “Legacies.”
Clearly, the chapter divisions reflect different periods of Stein’s life, yet they also delimit her
by using feminine stereotypes that deny her a complex and queer persona.
Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer discuss Stein’s role as a queer icon and its minimization
in relation to Picasso’s portrait. Locating the image within the “Bohemian Stein” typology,
which in itself renders her other, the authors position Picasso’s portrait as “blend[ing] Stein’s male
and female characteristics” by portraying her as physically massive, domineering, and ultimately
unfeminine (2011, 28). Stein’s appearance in Picasso’s portrait is no longer construed as a product
of an intimate social relationship between two equal subjects; instead, Picasso is given credit for
having “constructed what became Stein’s new persona in Paris, une hommesse, or mannish
woman” (28). As literary critic Shari Benstock argues in Women of the Left Bank, “Stein’s actions
were enormously threatening, precisely because her behavior suggested that the only alternative
to male dominance was the assumption of masculine authority” (1986, 189). Yet by attributing
the development of Stein’s public persona to Picasso, Corn and Latimer render her queer
appearance less threatening. Seeing Gertrude Stein argues that Picasso painted Stein as a “gender-
bending woman” using “mannerisms stereotypically associated with men or considered gender
neutral” (2011, 28). While commendable, this interpretation still reflects the simplification and
obfuscation that preserves institutional normativity.
These catalogues remind us that the task of ascribing meaning to paintings, photographs, and
sculptures is an unavoidably political aspect of contemporary curation and art history scholarship.
Moreover, because Seeing Gertrude Stein was the first exhibition to discuss of Stein’s gender and
sexuality, the differences between these four exhibition catalogues reveal that any attempts at
queer readings of her appearance in portraiture remain “socially and historically conditioned” by
institutional methodologies and earlier scholarship (Doyle 2013, 4–5). Stein’s queer persona and
adoption of masculine gender expression continues to receive short shrift in exhibitions and
catalogues. The recognition of Stein’s homosexuality in the 2011 exhibitions is notable; how-
ever, it took sixty years for curators to do this, even though literary scholars like Benstock
acknowledged Stein’s sexuality as early as 1986.
When considering the exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the
Contemporary Jewish Museum in 2011, it seems problematic that The Steins Collect, a
blockbuster which did not focus on sexual politics, received prime placement at major
museums, while an exhibition as groundbreaking as Seeing Gertrude Stein was shown in a
separate (but not equal) exhibition space. Yet additional exhibitions would not necessarily
resolve the incompatibility of queerness with the institutionalization of art. The systems and
individuals that mediate artworks structure and limit our understanding. As chapter 14 in this
volume attests, reproduction, framing, and labeling are also critically important.
The catalogues for these four exhibitions illustrate key elements of contemporary museum
curation that are not immediately obvious. If visitors to either 2011 exhibition did not realize
that another exhibition was taking place across town, they might not grasp that curators at
different institutions were approaching Stein from conflicting historical perspectives.
Following the decline of white-box postmodern exhibitions with minimal labeling, cura-
tors and institutional practices play a significant role in marginalizing queer and non-
heteronormative subjects for museum audiences. If an institution takes up a potentially
inflammatory subject, like the politics of sexual identity, it often does so in an unthreatening
 Curating Gertrude Stein 237

way – with controversial material behind curtains or warning signs. For Doyle, queerness
emerges when histories cannot be reduced to easily manageable narratives or categories, such
as those found in the catalogues for Stein exhibitions: queer people “feel recognized in those
sites where meanings” remain ambiguous or contradictory (2009, 395). Only these places
mirror the struggles of queer people fighting against what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described
in 1993 as “institutions … speaking with one voice” (quoted in Doyle 2009). It is in this way
that evolving catalogue descriptions of Stein and Toklas reflect the ongoing negotiation of
queer subjectivity portrayed in other institutions and in society as a whole.

References
Benstock, Shari. 1987. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bishop, Janet C., Cécile Debray, and Rebecca A. Rabinow, eds. 2011. The Steins Collect: Matisse,
Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Burns, Edward. 2011. “Alice Toklas and the Gertrude Stein Collection, 1946–1967.” In Bishop et al.,
259–265.
Coffman, Chris. 2017. “Reading Stein’s Genders: Transmasculine Signification in the 1910s and
1920s.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59(1): 1–27.
Conlan, Anna. 2010. “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology.” In
Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader, edited by Amy K. Levin, 253–263. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Corn, Wanda M., and Tirza True Latimer. 2011. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Cresap, Kelly. 1999. “Playing Dumb About Being Gay.” In The Queer Sixties, edited by Patricia Juliana
Smith, 43–61. Abingdon: Routledge.
Debray, Cécile. 2011. “Gertrude Stein and Painting: From Picasso to Picabia.” In Bishop et al., 223–242.
Doyle, Jennifer. 2009. “Queer Wallpaper.” In Preziosi, 391–402.
Doyle, Jennifer. 2013. Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Escudero-Alías, Maite. 2009. Long Live the King: A Genealogy of Performative Genders. Newcastle-upon-
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Golson, Lucille M. 1970. “The Michael Steins of San Francisco: Art Patrons and Collectors.” In
Gordon, 35–49.
Gordon, Irene, ed. 1970. Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New
York: Museum of Modern Art.
Green, Christopher. 2003. Art in France, 1900–1940. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gurian, Elaine Heumann. 1991. “Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities.” In Exhibiting Cul-
tures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 176–190.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hightower, John B. 1970. “Foreword.” In Gordon, 8–9.
Katz, Leon. 1970. “Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein.” In Gordon, 51–64.
Kelly, Mary. 2009. “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism.” In Preziosi, 352–355.
Kramer, Hilton. 1970. “In the Heyday of the Paris Avant Garde.” New York Times, December 27, 85.
Lord, Catherine, and Richard Meyer. 2013. Art & Queer Culture. London: Phaidon.
Moore, Lamont. 1951. “Preface.” In Yale University Art Gallery, 5–7.
Potter, Margaret. 1970. “Introduction.” In Gordon, 10–12.
Preziosi, Donald, ed. 2009. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silver, Kenneth E. 1989. Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant Garde and the First World War,
1914–1925. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
“Stein Exhibit Shows Variety.” 1951. Yale Daily News, February 13, 5.
238 Hayden Hunt

Stein, Gertrude. (1933) 1990. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books.
Sullivan, Martin E., and Connie Wolf. 2011. “Directors’ Foreword.” In Corn and Latimer, viii–ix.
Toklas, Alice. 1973. Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, edited by Edward Burns. New York: Liveright.
Yale University Art Gallery. 1951. Pictures for a Picture of Gertrude Stein as a Collector and Writer on Art and
Artists. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery.
20
“A BATTLEFIELD ALL THEIR OWN”: SELLING
WOMEN’S FICTIONS AS FACT AT
PLANTATION MUSEUMS
Joshua G. Adair

Despite works like Gone With the Wind (novel 1936, film 1939) capturing the popular
imagination by offering stylized – and for some, romantic – fantasies of the so-called Old
South, it is difficult for anyone conversant in the history of slavery to be seduced by their
glossy appearances. Harriet Jacobs, a former slave, makes clear that the Old South was no
site of romance:

Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes. I am telling you the plain
truth. Yet when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery, north-
erners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into
his den, “full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness.” Nay, more, they are not
only willing, but proud, to give their daughters in marriage to slaveholders. The
poor girls have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and of the flowering vines that all
the year round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they destined!
The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her
happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of com-
plexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born
unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it
is ravaged of its loveliness.
([1861]2003, 56–57)

Yet, an entire industry of Christian romance novel-writing has coalesced around these sites,
offering readers plantation-centered narratives which are presented as wholesomely
romantic – and, even more troublingly, factual. As Amazon.com reviewers of Tamera
Alexander’s Christmas at Carnton (2017) attest, a hybridity that melds fiction with fact –
often indistinguishably – has cropped up between such texts and the historical sites they
depict. In fact, many of the website’s reviews (eighteen pages worth as of February 2018),
reveal that these works serve as a gateway for readers to learn about (even eventually visit)
plantation sites, with many reviewers citing the novels as historically accurate, despite being
predominantly fiction (Amazon 2018).
240 Joshua G. Adair

This hybridity of museum and romance, at least in the case of plantation sites, proves much less
incongruous than it might initially seem. After all, many plantations-turned-museums have
always functioned as sites of fantasy for some. These visitors seek them out to find predictable, if
bowdlerized, narratives that reliably assert that Southerners were honorable, right-minded people
who participated minimally in, or admirably in opposition to, slavery. Such sites shore up certain
visitors’ sense of location in the positive progression of history, wherein mistakes may either be
admitted and forgiven or dismissed as emblematic of a bygone era. After such self- and South-
affirming sessions, visitors seeking this treatment – a single but sizeable constituency – depart with
a renewed sense of belonging, beauty, and boldness.
One might make a similar argument about heteronormative romance novel consumers;
were the world as they wish, it is unlikely they would turn to these tales. Much like their
plantation-patronizing counterparts, they seek an imagined way of life. Each constituency
feels slighted or shortchanged – even victimized in extreme cases – by lives that fail to fulfill
their dreams. Varying degrees of disappointment and denial – individually and collectively –
drive their determination never to face facts and insist instead upon fancy and fiction. In
other words, plantation sites and romance novels both offer willing audiences an opportunity
to engage with specific kinds of representations, including a well-developed archive of
emotional responses, which often reify heteronormativity on multiple levels, without chal-
lenging or complicating how the context is constructed in the first place. Visitors invested in
their misconceptions about the alleged glory of the Old South often find plantation museums
willing to meet their needs; similarly, readers seeking a world of idealized love and emotional
fulfillment need only immerse themselves in romance novels. Such fiction-fueled consumers
read and interpret selectively, manipulating features and historical figures to their own ends,
even if (or because) it means obscuring systemic racism, heteronormativity, and the like. Toni
Morrison calls for examination of these strategies in Playing in the Dark (1993): “we need
studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce
the invention and implications of whiteness. We need studies that analyze the strategic use of
black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters” (52). This
chapter aims to do just that as it explores the approaches of sites and novels that hybridize and
seek to merge the needs of these seemingly disparate, if similarly motivated, constituencies, all
while creating an entirely new manner of meaning – and mode of memorializing.
Whereas plantation museums have been engaged in selling fictions for some time now,
romance novels set in these places (as opposed to fictionalized plantations) have emerged
more recently, offering an opportunity to study a practice that may manifest elsewhere given
its success. In the last decade or so, a Christian romance novel industry has burgeoned in and
around several Nashville, Tennessee, historical plantations thanks to author Tamera Alex-
ander. Alexander has authored several trilogies, along with several stand-alone novels, and
makes clear that she intends to produce more (Alexander 2018a). Historic house museum
sites and fiction have collided before, including the Mercer-Williams House in Savannah,
Georgia, the setting of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1993). In fact,
Carnton Plantation, the focus of this particular essay and Alexander’s Christmas, also serves as
the setting for two recent novels by Robert Hicks: The Widow of the South (2006) and The
Orphan Mother (2017). Hicks’s novels focus upon the bloodshed and aftermath of the Civil
War, especially the Battle of Franklin, and the creation of a Confederate cemetery at Carnton
by its mistress, Carrie McGavock, together with her slave and later paid laborer, Mariah
Reddick. More closely couched in historical research, Hicks’s most elaborate inventions flesh
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 241

out historical figures, their actions, and motivations. His novels have been well received and
feature prominently in museum shops around Franklin, Tennessee; according to several
docents, too often they are taken as fact rather than fiction.
Many plantation sites sell fictional narratives – oral and written – for the sake of survival,
implying that the preservation of such spaces – regardless of literal or figurative costs – always
matters most.1 These institutions thus endorse a combination of silences, half-truths, and in some
cases, outright fictions to attract visitors and remain financially solvent. Eichstedt and Small argue
that such sites “work to construct and maintain public white (male-dominated) racial identities
that both articulate and bolster a sense of (white) pride in a partial history of freedom, democracy,
and hard work. In this story, slavery and African Americans are presented as almost incidental to
the growth of the South and, by extension, the United States” (2002, 4).
Confronted with the choice to preserve plantations and their pasts, museum staff and a
powerful segment of their supporters often favor fiction over full disclosure. The possibility
of these spaces falling into disrepair and ruin, or taking on alternate purposes as a result of
truth-telling, never emerges as an option, it seems.2 Their visitors, they imagine, expect to
encounter a pleasant narrative featuring a perfunctory mention of slavery – especially if it is
made clear that this particular slave master was “one of the good ones” who treated slaves
“like family” and that his undying support for states’ rights demanded participation in the
Confederate cause. Such owners did not fight to continue/perpetuate slavery; in fact,
according to the many tour guides I have queried over the last several years, one might
believe that not even one ever did.
To hear them tell it, the Civil War was always a fight about principles, not enslavement. This
particular rhetorical strategy continues to hold sway with some audiences, which is not surprising
considering the strong sense of victimhood that persists in the South. Eichstedt and Small assert,
“victim status is incredibly powerful and seductive – if one is a victim oneself, it seems, one
cannot be held accountable for one’s own abhorrent behavior. Shifting the talk to the victimi-
zation of white Southerners apparently means that we don’t need to talk about what transpired
before or since; white victimization is the ultimate tool of deflection” (2002, 260).
Indeed, museum narratives in many plantation sites suggest that no time has passed;
the Civil War continues and could conclude differently if public opinion and under-
standing would only shift. It seems almost as though Southerners raised on this logic of
victimhood have experienced war’s trauma firsthand and find themselves unable or unwilling
to recall the most agony-filled – and damning – features of this history. Their insistent
rehearsal – and ongoing search for external validation – simultaneously signals an inability to
accept their own logic and a dogged refusal to shatter an illusion that, in some sense, is
always already fissured. As a result, they return to the scene – in person and/or in the
pages of a novel – to traverse unsettled and unsettling terrain, hoping to find some
reassurance of rectitude.
This mode of response does not account for all visitors or readers – not even among those
who hold a Lost Cause mentality. If the current state of national politics serves as any index,
race resentment and hatred continue to fester, with far-right groups persistently misrepresenting
and/or fabricating history and claiming victimhood on the basis of their socioeconomic status
and/or personal prejudices. Plantation museums are not insensate to such cultural shifts, and
canned narratives about “good” slave owners and “happy” almost-family slaves leave room for
visitors to insert themselves into these well-established stories in which white folks hold all
power and enjoy a status that is unrecoverable because people of color gained equal rights.
242 Joshua G. Adair

These narratives gloss over or ignore, among other things, the contours of class, failing to
mention that the vast majority of white people in the mid-nineteenth century did not live the
rarefied lives of plantation owners – to do so would shatter the organizing fantasy of these
fictions.
Once the pat replies about slavery have been carefully – and quickly – recited, visitors may
return to admiring Belter Rococo armchairs or wax ornaments worked by the mansion’s
mistress, preserved for posterity under costly cloches. In the end, these visits provide a com-
munal experience with presumably like-minded compatriots in which the goal is to learn and
enjoy oneself; as with the novels I cite, audiences pay for this entertainment, and to
encounter the unpleasant would seriously diminish the value of the admission price. By
nominally mentioning slavery, plantation sites evade the charge of whitewashing without
offering much substance. In fact, I have left many such places with a considerably more
detailed provenance of various pieces of furniture than of any enslaved persons. Plantation
chairs stand a far better chance of being identified than any former slaves do.
This approach is not new. In the years immediately following the Civil War, many
individuals and groups set about romanticizing the conflict’s motives and meanings, all in
an attempt to fashion an alternate, fictional version of history (Davis 1996; Gallagher and
Nolan 2010). Janney describes one such group: “between 1865 and 1915 white South-
erners frequently hailed the critical role Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAS) had played
in crafting the traditions that honored the Confederate cause and keeping alive a sense of
southern solidarity. They understood that it had been the Ladies, not Confederate veterans,
former politicians, or even the Daughters [of the Confederacy], who had established Con-
federate cities of the dead and had organized elaborate Memorial Day celebrations where
they might gather to mourn their failed cause” (2008, 2). Throughout her study, Janney
illustrates the pivotal role of such efforts in shaping perceptions of agency and blame
regarding the Civil War. In her conception, “The Lost Cause provided a sense of relief
to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, and its rituals and rhetoric
celebrated the memory of personal sacrifice in a region rapidly experiencing change and
disorder” (3). In other words, memorializing sacrifice took precedence, eclipsing the
motivations and realities that caused the war. Survivors spun stories suiting their politics
and their pain.
The gendered nature of this memory work is especially important, as we can discern its
continuance among the heteronormative novels of Tamera Alexander and among women’s
groups contributing to the narratives that inform and reshape our understanding of plantation
sites. Janney contends “gender infused efforts [served] to commemorate the past and to define
what it meant to be an ex-Confederate after defeat. Women’s postwar organizations not only
employed the skills they had gleaned from decades of experience, but they also served an even
more valuable purpose to their male counterparts. Because women, and not ex-Confederate
soldiers, directed early memorialization efforts, white Southerners hoped that northerners
would perceive their work as less politically motivated and threatening” (6). Alexander’s novels
continue this tradition, often on behalf of historical sites like Carnton.

History’s authors
Alexander’s fictions cater to an amnesiac nostalgia and operate as ancillary documents to
support the stories created by the sites she depicts, which operate today as museums. As such,
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 243

the texts perform an integral function in delivering false narratives that present these sites as
politically unproblematic while fashioning them as places of fantasy for the women who
associate them with romances they read. In turn, the sale of her work furthers her financial
wellbeing, as well as that of the sites themselves.
Alexander, whose website declares her “one of today’s most popular writers of inspirational
historical romance,” has built an industry producing novels set at plantations like Belmont
Mansion and Belle Meade, both in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as Carnton (Alexander 2018b).
Throughout her website, Alexander presents an image that aligns with the worldview that
characterizes her writing. She appears to be an upper-middle class, white, Christian-identified
woman marketing herself as a model of religious practice and faith, who also follows a Keto diet
and loves her dog and two adult children. Folksy, friendly invitations to join book clubs focused
on her novels and to engage with her pepper the site. She labors to appear both accessible and
worthy of emulation. She even encourages her audience – whom she seems to imagine as
exclusively female – “to grab your friends and your book club buddies and … visit the Belmont
Mansion, Belle Meade Plantation, and Carnton Plantation” (Alexander 2018c).
If her body of work is any indication of success, Alexander appears to be doing well,
with Christmas appearing as number 409 of over ten thousand books in its subgenre
(Amazon 2018). To date, she has published thirteen novels and two novellas, many of
which have been nominated for, or received, Christian book awards. She has won the
Christy award for Christian fiction three times, after being nominated nine. Her publisher,
Zondervan (also operating as Thomas Nelson), proudly proclaims its role in founding the
Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. The most prominent way Christianity man-
ifests in these texts is the absence of sexual, or even risqué, content. The texts also refer to
God’s plan and faith, though overall they remain fairly anodyne in their religious appeals.
In fact, one might even argue that it is the marketing, more so than the content of the texts
themselves, that appeals to the Christian faith.
Frequently derided by male and female readers alike, romance novels have long been the
exclusive province of select female readers. While it might be tempting to resort to stereotyping
the women who consume this fiction, I opt not to because my informal research indicates that
such readers are not easily pigeonholed or representative of any single demographic. One thing is
clear: in this particular case not just any romance novel will suit. These readers want clean fiction,
free of depictions of sex (Markert 2017, 269). Apparently this (lack of) sex sells. By all accounts,
the Christian romance market is booming, especially for houses like Zondervan, owned by
publishing giant HarperCollins since 1988 (Markert 2017, 274). Zondervan is also located in
Nashville, another sign that all parts of this phenomenon converge in one geographical locus,
suggesting shared sensibilities as well as sensitivity to the nuances of the needs of customers, be
they readers and/or museum visitors.
Such attention to nuance and the peculiarities of place help Alexander and Zondervan
court a specific audience by appealing to a sense of community, nostalgia for a lost past (akin
to the grief of former colonizers for an imperial past), religious faith, and social sensibilities.
Alexander’s website, especially the FAQ page, highlights her belief that her writing represents
Christian morality: “Each time I write a book, I take steps closer to Christ. And as readers
read my books, I hope that they take steps closer to Him too” (Alexander 2018d). Such a
bold claim invites readers’ loyalty and seeks to forge an emotional connection, I would argue,
with the texts, the sites they represent, and a carefully constructed version of the author
herself (Alexander 2018d). Elevated in this way, Alexander’s books operate in a manner far
244 Joshua G. Adair

more significant than frivolous, escapist romance novels. In fact, one might argue that they
are marketed as representing a profound truth – couched in sincere religiosity – for readers to
embrace and apply in their lives.
Alexander encourages this behavior, first and foremost, by attempting to forge a bond and
create community with her readers. She reminds them repeatedly that she is a local, sug-
gesting that they might cross paths at a neighborhood coffee shop or store. The site even
features videos of the author delivering purportedly historical tours of Belle Meade planta-
tion, during which she mentions the “quiet service” of slaves and discusses a novel set at the
site (Alexander 2018e). Another video linked to her Facebook profile features Alexander in
front of Carnton explaining that “God worked within me as I was writing these novels,”
while providing a sales pitch for a “Southern Mansion Reader Weekend.” The event, which
features catered meals at Belmont, Belle Meade, and Carnton, also boasts lectures on unspe-
cified topics from museum curators and from the author herself, again suggesting an official
relationship between the author and these museums (Alexander 2018f).
Indeed, readers who first encounter Alexander’s novels via her website quickly learn that
some of her books are the subject of specialized tours: “Both the Belmont Mansion and Belle
Meade Plantation offer special ‘reader tours’ for readers of Tamera’s novels. Belmont Man-
sion offers the A Lasting Impression tour, and Belle Meade Plantation offers the To Whisper Her
Name tour. ... At present, there’s not a special ‘reader tour’ at Carnton, but their regular tour
is marvelous and gives wonderful insight into the history of this home and the real characters
that people the Carnton novels” (Alexander 2018g). Alexander’s use of the term “real
characters” lacks qualification, so readers may merge fictional representations with his-
torical personages, while also imagining fictional characters as somehow real. In so
doing, the researched and documented narratives offered on other tours – not that
those are unproblematic or entirely accurate either – begin to recede, occluded by the
magic of make-believe.
In turn, the gift shop for each site promotes outsize piles of Alexander’s novels, which is how I
first encountered them and started to ponder their potential effect upon readers who were (or
would become) visitors. After all, it is a strange set of circumstances that juxtaposes research-based
history books alongside fanciful Christian romance fiction. In fact, Alexander’s books were dis-
played more prominently than the more reliable, researched scholarly writing. When asked,
employees at Belmont, Belle Meade, and Carnton all insisted that no formal relationship exists.
One chatty clerk noted, however, that the books had helped increase the number of visitors and
their curiosity about these places. “Many of the women who come through,” she observed,
“have lived here all their lives and never visited. But, Miss Alexander’s books made them curious
and they come to learn more about the characters.” When I inquired if they also wished to learn
the history of the place, she appeared perplexed at the distinction I attempted to establish. Her
disorientation or willful ignorance characterizes much of this enterprise, reminding us – especially
in this era of “alternative facts” and “fake news” – that there is a buyer for almost any story, so
long as its content satisfies readers’ needs.

(Con)textual study
Although I could choose any of the seven Belmont or Belle Meade novels, I opt to focus on
Christmas since it is set during the Civil War (most transpire slightly after) and Alexander’s most
recent work. The facts of the plantation-museum are fairly straightforward: the mansion was built in
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 245

1826 by the McGavocks. By the start of the Civil War, the next generation, John and Carrie
McGavock, had become master and mistress of Carnton and its thirty-nine slaves, the majority of
whom were sent to the Deep South for what one docent described as “safekeeping” during the war.
When the Battle of Franklin, one of the bloodiest of the war, broke out on November 30, 1864, the
plantation became a field hospital. During tours, guides eagerly highlight the extensive bloodstaining
throughout the mansion, which resulted from injured soldiers being nursed, and operated upon, in
the house. Even today the site takes on a grim, grisly feel as one realizes that all its finery rests upon
blood stains – undeniable and prominent reminders of Carnton’s terrible history.
Alexander’s simple – formulaic, even – novella follows the protagonist, Aletta, a newly
widowed pregnant mother with a young son, as she struggles to survive the Civil War. At the
novel’s outset, she loses her employment with a garment manufacturer and is forced to find work
elsewhere. Fortunately, Carrie McGavock has just placed an advertisement for an extra cook (in
addition to her kitchen slave) to help stage a fundraiser for the troops in early December 1863. The
book’s cover announces, “Amid war and the fading dream of the Confederacy, a wounded soldier
and a destitute widow discover the true meaning of Christmas – and sacrificial love. ... Set against
the backdrop and history of the Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee, Christmas at Carnton is
a story of hope renewed and faith restored” (Alexander 2017). In addition to claiming to represent
the history of Carnton, now owned by the Battle of Franklin Trust, the cover features a festive
holiday photograph of the mansion in an incongruously snowy landscape, with a lit candle in each
window and an evergreen wreath hung on the front gate. The back cover reveals that the Trust
granted rights for the photo, another gesture that suggests authenticity, mutual support, and shared
purpose.
In these peculiar circumstances, it is worthwhile to consider Michaela Dixon’s “The
Unreliable Perpetrator: Negotiating Narrative Perspective at Museums of the Third Reich
and the GDR,” which offers a compelling framework to conceptualize how fictions influ-
ence and impede museum visitors, albeit in a remarkably different context. Dixon focuses
upon the perspective from which a museum narrates history and the ways that perspective
may either indoctrinate and/or alienate visitors, depending upon context and their worldviews.
Although Alexander’s texts are not official site narratives, they perform a prominent function as
ancillary, museum-endorsed narratives by way of their robust promotion in specialty tours, gift
shops, and elsewhere. Dixon argues that museums endeavor to align visitors’ perspectives with
those of the primary figures – the “focalisers,” to use her term – presented at historical sites. As
a result, she contends, visitors tend to “accept this particular interpretation of events as authentic
reality” (2017, 244). This concept offers insight into the ways that visitors, in this case primed
by a fictional account they find appealing, adopt strategies to reject unpleasant history.
This is evident in one Amazon.com review: “I appreciated Tamera’s sensitive and deft
look into the Civil War through the eyes of a Confederate. History paints soldiers like Jake as
‘bad guys’ and ‘the losers,’ but Tamera points out they are neither” (McCall 2018). Apart
from the implied intimacy of using the author’s first name, this reviewer highlights her desire
to be shown a specific vantage – one in which the South does not emerge as a loser and sites
like Carnton do not emblematize the ugliness of the past. Another reviewer offers a defense
of slavery at the time: “When we grow up in a society that believes in certain things, we
typically accept it as normal … as the normal way of life” (BookwormMama14 2018). For
her, Alexander’s novel offers a framework to excuse slavery as an aberration of a bygone era.
In short, readers find the justifications they seek in order to maintain, rather than dismantle,
the organizing logic of their worldviews.3
246 Joshua G. Adair

Alexander consistently caters to such views. In her dedication to Christmas, she positions the
novella as an attempt to “shed light and wisdom on our still all-too-divided United States”
(Alexander 2017, ix): “The struggles of those who’ve gone before us, particularly within this era
of America’s history, offer great encouragement to me. I’m encouraged by their steadfast faith in
Jesus Christ and their determination to cling to what was most important, to what truly knit
them together, such as the eternal hope found in the true meaning of Christmas. ... I’m nearing
completion of the first Carnton novel which will release in the fall of 2018. If you’ve not visited
the Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee, I hope you’ll consider doing so” (Alexander
2017, ix–x). In her page-and-a-half welcome to the novella, she situates its relationship to the
site. She wades into the culture wars connected to the Civil War, which have never fully abated
in the Southern USA.
Although the allusions lack specificity for the uninitiated, her repeated references to divisions
and conflict offer solidarity to those who feel marginalized and persecuted as loyal, family-
oriented Christians in contemporary culture. With this strategy, Alexander signals to her readers,
that this novella (and her others) emulates the tactics practiced by the Ladies’ Memorial Asso-
ciations. She volunteers to write a history untainted by the interpretations of outsiders who could
never appreciate or understand her truth. As a result, Alexander shoehorns a political agenda into
a genre traditionally considered apolitical and written purely for entertainment.
The text of Christmas, like Alexander’s other romances set in sites which are now museums,
operates as a de facto guidebook. The narrative addresses slavery only briefly, and always from a
Lost Cause-States’ Rights perspective that insists the Civil War was not fought over emancipa-
tion. One Amazon.com reviewer even thanks Alexander for reminding readers that the war was
“ultimately fought over state’s [sic] rights” (Jill 2018). Events in the novel strengthen the
impression that slavery is tacitly if not explicitly approved. Early on, as Aletta approaches Carnton
for the first time, we learn that there is “Not a worker in sight. . . . And if Carnton was like other
plantations, they’d sent their slaves south months ago” (Alexander 2017, 40). Shortly thereafter,
we discover that Tempy, a kitchen slave, has been kept to ensure the family does not have to
cook for itself (47). Within minutes of entering the mansion and being told that the position she
seeks has been filled, Aletta begins to befriend, and be served by, Tempy, who pours her hot
cocoa and engages her in conversation (49). The entire passage reads more like an encounter
between casual friends than an account of an impoverished white woman meeting a slave. In
fact, several moments later we are shown that Tempy senses Aletta’s plight as she sets about trying
to feed her on the pretext that she over-peppered the soup (52). Almost immediately, Tempy
emerges as yet another exemplar of a black woman expected to anticipate and answer for a white
woman’s needs. This scene is pure fantasy as we are asked to accept that Tempy would have free
license over the food she prepares, giving it away at will. At no point does the author acknowl-
edge the danger to which such behavior would have subjected Tempy. Furthermore, in Alex-
ander’s universe, Aletta sees herself as somehow inferior, or at least beholden, to Tempy, another
contemporary conceit designed to highlight the white woman’s Christian humility. It may also
mirror some Southerners’ feelings that they are expected to kowtow to blacks, even though they
still consider African Americans inferior.
In a brief moment of recognition that reads more like revisionist history, the narrator
observes, “But Aletta knew that Tempy, as a slave, had no doubt suffered losses stemming
from death and far worse. Because in many cases, for a slave, the person you loved hadn’t
died. They’d been bartered or sold as though they weren’t human, flesh and blood like
everyone else” (53). By the next page, however, she has begun to fantasize that the South
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 247

will win: “Oh, she prayed that would be true” (54). Then the narrator launches into a
familiar, and fallacious, defense:

Yet love for home and family and the determination to have a voice in the law of the land
had to count for something too. She and Warren [Aletta’s deceased husband] had never
owned slaves. Neither had their parents nor most of the people they knew. That hadn’t
been at the heart of this conflict for them. How many nights had she and Warren stayed
awake late discussing this, most heatedly, before he’d left to join the Tennessee Army.
“This isn’t only about slavery, Aletta. President Lincoln refuses to recognize the Con-
federate States of America. He sent a garrison to occupy Fort Sumter! The Confederates
attempted to negotiate their withdrawal, but again, Lincoln refused. Now he’s issued a call-
up for seventy-five thousand troops to put down what he’s terming ‘the rebellion’ in the
South. We have a president claiming power for himself – and the government – that far
exceeds what’s given to him in the Constitution. And if we don’t stand up now, I fear that
what was fought for almost a hundred years ago might be lost forever.”
(55)

As this passage illustrates, Alexander inserts heavy-hitting politics into an arena typically
dedicated to love, emotion, and passion. She also delivers a long-debunked narrative about
states’ rights as a mechanism for her readers to obscure slave history at Carnton with a
calculated screed about patriotism, constitutional boundaries, and political motivations.
This parroting of Lost Cause apologists grows even more complex when we consider
Alexander’s decision to insert individuals who never owned slaves – which is not necessa-
rily the same as being an abolitionist – at the center of a narrative about a place built and
maintained by slaves. Aletta wants the grandeur and romance of the plantation – like some
of its contemporary visitors – without assuming the burden of why and how such sites
came to be. The seduction of the space, a larger-than-life manifestation of white power,
appears to render her and similarly influenced visitors senseless before the terrible system of
displaced victimhood on which the house and novel thrive. Shortly thereafter, we learn
that Aletta supports the Confederacy despite not owning slaves. We also discover that her
love interest, Jake, might hold abolitionist, if not entirely unprejudiced, tendencies: “But
he wasn’t fighting this war to keep Negroes enslaved. If he had his druthers, he’d free the
lot of them. A free man worked harder and contributed more to society than a slave ever
did. And he’d known enough Negroes throughout his life to know that they weren’t so
different from white men. There were good men and bad, be they dark skinned or light. It
was what lay within a man that really counted” (73). While this sentiment proves refresh-
ing, it also stands out as incongruous. His viewpoints are anachronistic – like many of the
defenses deployed by docents at plantation museums – even as he tries to justify supporting
the Confederacy.
Jake appears to experience more difficulty with his mission once his commanding officer sends
him to Carnton, post-injury, to help with Carrie McGavock’s fundraiser. Christmas’s back cover
announces that “Kowtowing to a bunch of ‘crinolines’ isn’t his idea of soldiering. But orders are
orders, and he soon discovers this group of ladies – one, in particular – is far more than he bargained
for” (Alexander 2017). Carnton, in Alexander’s conception, operates as a woman-dominated space,
where “crinolines” establish and interpret history, like the real-life Ladies’ Memorial Associations.
This depiction of empowerment further inculcates women readers into the world of the novel and
248 Joshua G. Adair

helps confer agency in deciding what represents reality, while actively encouraging readers to dis-
regard both researched history and outsiders’ voices.
Throughout Christmas, narrating Carnton takes on a gendered nature. Jake struggles to main-
tain cultural and personal masculine ideals in a place that has become woman-centric: “Females
young and old, with children in tow, had shown up to help with preparations for the auction. So
much crinoline. Too much. And the thrum of conversation filled the place. It occurred to him
that these women would use more words in a minute than he would likely use in a month of
Sundays. Being the only male in the group, he’d met many if not most of them by now, but had
stopped trying to keep track of names after the first four or five” (121). Alexander, relying
heavily upon stereotypes, appears to pay homage to gendered traditions by putting forth a male
hero – strong, silent, subdued – who finds women tiresome, if not entirely superfluous. His
words also remind us that while the text avoids overtly racist remarks, sexist ones are offered as
relatively acceptable; this, of course, operates as its own lost cause nostalgia for dominant mas-
culinity. That dominant masculinity, in turn, then must be subverted, but only ever partially, by
a furtive yet forceful white, upper-class female author(ity). This trope is so common that it seems
to demand little attention. However, just beneath the surface lies a revolutionary appeal to
readers; here is a man who cannot control everything, living in the midst of women who have
remade the world after men abandoned them to defend slavery.
Almost immediately thereafter, Jake experiences an epiphany. Rather than remaining in his
haze of resentment fueled by his own fragile masculinity, he begins to consider these women
his equals, at least in part: “How could he ever have thought that women could be shielded
from war’s cruelties? That they weren’t strong enough to bear up beneath the weight of it?
Granted, he would never wish to be fighting side by side with them on the battlefield. But
these women were fighting nonetheless. On a battlefield all their own” (125). Apart from the
dig about women participating in battle – another jab at contemporary culture – Jake grants
grudgingly that women inhabit a more important role than he had previously acknowledged. As
a result, readers are invited to envision these women as larger-than-life in their power and
importance because they exhibit an autonomy not fully realized in our culture today, many
would argue. In addition, the text reinforces the notion that good Christian women must work
in the background, humbly, and in doing so take on greater power. In the end, it becomes dif-
ficult to see the plantation as a place of abjection constructed by the cruel system of chattel
slavery. Instead, readers are guided to imagine a near-magical matriarchy elevating white women
to the superiority the author seems to believe they crave – and deserve – and which Carnton
docents reify regularly by focusing upon the fictionalized Carrie McGavock.
As a result, that hallmark of slavery, the great plantation mansion, transforms into a site of
relative empowerment, liberation, and accomplishment for white women, even as it becomes
far more difficult to admit and address its horrifying history. With its appeals to the nine-
teenth-century Cult of Domesticity, women readers are encouraged to reconceptualize home
(even if it is a mansion) as a site of political engagement, wherein society can be restructured
and traditional gender roles may be remade so long as white men are not challenged too
directly. In this way, the narrator actively forgets how such empowerment came about. Apart
from Tempy, no slaves complicate the narrative. For the cook’s part, slaves appear more as
trusted, longtime family friends – another time-worn trope – who happily serve while dis-
missing any concern for their plight as ill-informed. At one point near the end of the novella,
Aletta observes, “No matter what time I rise, Tempy, you’re always down here at work”
(161). While the logical response should be, “I’m a slave,” Tempy instead explains, “I’m old
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 249

and can’t sleep no more like I used to” (161). Other than a few moments when Aletta
perfunctorily recalls slavery, she appears blissfully blind to its horrors.
In turn, she also finds someone to serve her. As she climbs in rank – at least symbo-
lically – she becomes less able to grasp the realities of slavery or her own role in prop-
ping up the institution. Not long after ruminating, “What must it have been like to have
had all the choices in life taken from you? Your freedom stripped away?” Aletta consoles
herself, “with both a grateful and humble heart that at least she had choices. Choices that
were hers alone to make” (162). While we know this will not remain true once she
marries Jake and becomes his property, it is the illusion of power and freedom that
matters here because it speaks to contemporary readers’ desire for a similar liberty and
potentially elevated status, though with different contexts and stakes.
With the fundraiser a success and Christmas looming, the novella concludes just as it
becomes clear that Jake and Aletta will predictably marry – with the favor of God. In the
epilogue, set in summer 1864, the happy couple has opened a woodworking shop to fashion
prostheses for war amputees, suggesting that Aletta and Jake also apply empathy in a pros-
thetic fashion – that is, capable of being removed, when advantageous. This comes as no
surprise since earlier in the novella we learn that Aletta’s father, a woodworker, had educated
her in the trade, another display of atypical ingenuity and empowerment. The novella closes
with Aletta re-reading a newspaper column written about the Carnton fundraiser: “These
women of the Women’s Relief Society – these genteel, courageous females who fight a
battle men have yet to endure – aren’t merely knitting socks and sewing quilts as I’d first
imagined. They’re knitting this community together in a way it hasn’t been before, and
they’re emboldening their husbands and sons and fathers and brothers to surge ever forward
in the battle for freedom and in the defense of love and honor for country” (204). The
author of the piece, a former detractor of their efforts, continues at length in recanting
criticism that they ought to have just collected funds. The column credits the women
with forging the community that emerges from the war and suggests they will enjoy
heavenly rewards for their efforts. Without overtly stating as much, the piece underlines,
one last time, an undying dedication to the false Lost Cause narrative and reasserts ideas
about women’s influence in spreading and perpetuating this narrative. As an organizing fic-
tion of both novel and museum, the column may also serve as a continued call to action to
maintain the narrative around which much of the South’s identity is scaffolded.
Ultimately, Christmas and Alexander’s other plantation novels and their museum counterparts
leave readers and museum visitors with a quandary. Has the author initiated a new business
model that will crop up at other museums? How long can institutions sell stories that conflict and
compete with well-known historical evidence? Although I have been unable to find completely
parallel examples, some institutions already engage in a form of hybridization by selling works of
fiction about their sites.4 As funds and attendance decline, I suspect this particular modus operandi
will spread elsewhere. Nevertheless, I continue to wonder why a museum, ostensibly dedicated
to educating visitors, would promote fictions that can only muddle – even purposefully mis-
represent – its message, unless the primary goal is financial gain and/or the furtherance of false
narratives. For the museum’s part, dollars flow in from those searching for the “real” Carnton
after reading these novels. In a city with a network of such sites – and similar, if not nearly
identical, narratives written about them – these Christian romances operate as a unique tool to
draw in a segment of women customers physically, intellectually, and emotionally. It facilitates
their participation in fabricating a past modeled after the Lost Cause mentality fashioned by
250 Joshua G. Adair

women’s groups since the 1860s. Quite likely, this mechanism also ensures repeat customers – as
Alexander encourages – to recall favorite scenes as they rent the sites for book club meetings,
social occasions, and special events like weddings. In light of these financial benefits, it behooves
all parties to downplay the painful past. Perhaps most significant – even more than the financial
profits this arrangement reaps – is that these romances lend authority and appeal to narratives that
were already being told, just not necessarily sold for profit.

Notes
1 This is not universally true. The Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana, for example, has focused
almost entirely upon slavery since it opened in 2014. See http://whitneyplantation.com/. In the
Nashville, Tennessee, area, Belle Meade Plantation offers the most sustained examination of slavery
of any of the other sites Alexander writes about. When I toured the site, however, the docent
guided my group through the house (mentioning slavery occasionally) and then offered a proble-
matic choice: “Would you now like to try a free glass of our wine [from the plantation winery], or
learn about slavery on the property?” Of the approximately fifteen people on the tour, my group of
three was alone in venturing forth to the well-restored slave cabins to learn more.
2 Other types of historic house museums are taking this approach. See, for instance, Burns (2015) and
National Council on Public History (2015).
3 Not all Christians construe romances of this sort as acceptable entertainment. See, for instance,
Parker (2015) or Murray (2011).
4 Colonial Williamsburg, for example, offers children’s books presenting fictionalized versions of his-
torical personages at the site. See: The Mystery of the Blue Gowned Ghost (Wirkner 1994), Caesar’s
Story (Nixon 2000), and Ann’s Story: 1747 (Nixon 2004).

References
Alexander, Tamera. 2017. Christmas at Carnton. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018a. “Coming Soon.” http://tameraalexander.com/coming_soon.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018b. “Tamera Alexander.” http://tameraalexander.com/.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018c. “About.” http://tameraalexander.com/about.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018d. “FAQs.” http://tameraalexander.com/about/faqs.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018e. “Extras.” http://tameraalexander.com/extras/videos.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018f. “Facebook Videos.” https://www.facebook.com/tamera.alexander/videos/
1512401205513304/.
Alexander, Tamera. 2018g. “Books.” http://tameraalexander.com/books.
Amazon. 2018. “Christmas at Carnton.” https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-at-Carnton-Tamera
-Alexander/dp/0310293243/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8.
Berendt, John. 1993. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Random House.
BookwormMama14. 2018. “I love Christmas stories.” Review of Christmas at Carnton on Amazon.com.
https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-at-Carnton-Tamera Alexander/dp/0310293243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=
UTF8&qid=1521643674&sr=8–1&keywords=christmas+at+carnton.
Burns, Andrea. 2015. “Resource or Burden? Historic House Museums Confront the 21st Century.”
http://ncph.org/history-at-work/resource-or-burden/.
Davis, William C. 1996. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press.
Dixon, Michaela. 2017. “The Unreliable Perpetrator: Negotiating Narrative Perspective at Museums of
the Third Reich and GDR.” German Life and Letters 70(2): 241–261.
Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan. 2010. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Eichstedt, Jennifer L., and Stephen Small. 2002. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern
Plantation Museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
 Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact 251

Hicks, Robert. 2006. The Widow of the South. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Hicks, Robert. 2017. The Orphan Mother. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Jacobs, Harriet. (1861) 2003. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/ja
cobs.html#jac49”.
Janney, Caroline E. 2008. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost
Cause. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Jill. 2018. “Great Civil War Story Through the Eyes of the Women at Home.” Review of Christmas at
Carnton on Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-at-Carnton-Tamera-Alexander/p
roduct-reviews/0310293243/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_paging_btm_10?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_review
s&pageNumber=10.
Markert, John. 2017. “God is Love: The Christian Romance Market.” Publishing Research Quarterly
33: 268–282.
McCall, Stephanie. 2018. “Merry Christmas from Carnton – Merry, Indeed!” Review of Christmas at
Carnton on Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-at-Carnton-Tamera-Alexander/dp/
0310293243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521643674&sr=8-1&keywords=christmas+at+carnton.
Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage Books.
Murray, Tamela Hancock. 2011. “Christian Romance Novels – Fact or Fiction?” https://stevelaube.
com/christian-romance-fact-or-fiction/.
National Council on Public History. 2015. “Imagining a Future for Historic House Museums, Part
One.” http://ncph.org/history-at-work/imagining-a-future-part-1/.
Nixon, Joan Lowery. 2000. Caesar’s Story: 1759. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.
Nixon, Joan Lowery. 2004. Ann’s Story: 1747. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Parker, Molly. 2017. “4 Potential Pitfalls of Christian Romance Novels.” https://www.crosswalk.com/
faith/women/4-potential-pitfalls-of-christian-romance-novels.html.
Whitney Plantation. 2018. http://whitneyplantation.com/.
Wirkner, Linda. 1994. The Mystery of the Blue-Gowned Ghost. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.
PART V
Thinking Outside the Binary Box
Amy K. Levin

Some of the most thought-provoking moments in editing this book arose when working with
this section, which focuses on transgender, gender fluidity, nonbinary gender, and queer activism
in galleries and museums. We were challenged because, to quote Gossett, Stanley, and Burton,
“representations do not simply re-present an already existing reality but are also doors into
making new futures possible” (2017, xviii). The projects described in these chapters dare to
imagine new methods and practices for inclusion.
In editing these chapters, we encountered uncharted territory. Selecting appropriate
gender pronouns seemed simple compared to deciding how to caption a grayscale repro-
duction of a color photograph by a contemporary artist depicting an archival monochrome
photograph of a Roman bust which has been labeled with both male and female names
(Figure 14.2 – no doubt readers will have to peruse this sentence more than once). We also
had to address the irony implicit in the opposition conjured by the terms nonbinary and
binary, which undercut the indeterminacy of the former. In the process of resolving these
questions, we offended one or two authors by miscomprehending their intent or the ways in
which their ideas were radical. Fortunately for us, they were patient and generous.
Such instances, while difficult, have invigorated us time and again. We are grateful to the
contributors for everything their articles have taught us about our own presumptions and
prejudices. Even though the chapters in this section close the manuscript, they cover some of
the first topics that we considered for the collection, which were not addressed in a sub-
stantial way in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums. As mentioned in the introduction, before
2010, there were very few exhibitions and scholarly articles related to museums and
transgender, gender fluidity, or nonbinary gender and sexuality.
By 2016, however, this circumstance was changing. Michael Petry, artist and director of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in London, introduced me to Åsa Johannesson and her work.
Johannesson creates startling images of gender ambiguity which reject binary thinking. Her the-
oretical approach, outlined in chapter 14, which she coauthored with Clair Le Couteur, questions
the ways in which Western societies rely on binary concepts that go back centuries, excluding vast
areas of knowledge and entire constellations of possibilities for being. For this reason, it was
important that we include not only a chapter by Johannesson but one about her, and we asked
Petry to write a chapter that would compare Johannesson’s compassionate and groundbreaking
254 Amy K. Levin

portraits to other photographers’ treatment of queerness and nonbinary gender. The discussion of
gender fluidity in chapter 21 is a result of this request.
The following chapter, “Never a Small Project: Transgender Inclusion and Community
Engagement in the Amsterdam Museum,” derives from my conviction that this Amsterdam
institution has been particularly successful with community engagement, especially when initi-
ated by staff members Mirjam Sneeuwloper, Annemarie de Wildt, and Imara Limon. When I
interviewed Sneeuwloper, I realized that the Transmission exhibition deserved space in this book
because of its persistent inclusion of members of local transgender communities; its evolution to
accommodate criticism and shifting viewpoints; and its lasting effects on those who participated
in the project. The exhibition was truly an example of a museum’s local activism and ability to
stimulate social change. I wanted a larger, English-speaking audience to learn about it. To pre-
sent this project honestly, however, I felt it essential to experiment with form and structure,
reversing traditions that place academics as experts and others as research subjects. As a result, the
article is coauthored, with extensive sections by members of Amsterdam trans groups.
Another institution in the Netherlands proved equally exciting in terms of its innovations with
gender inclusion. Daniel Neugebauer was head of mediation at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindho-
ven when I first inquired, and his joy was palpable. I have rarely met anyone as enthusiastic about
their work, and when Neugebauer showed me the museum’s queer glossary as well as garments
printed with information relating to artwork, I understood that I was in the presence of cutting-edge
practices. Olle Lundin and Anne Rensma, who have had major roles in the institution’s queering
work as well, became coauthors of the chapter on the Van Abbe. The authors situate their innova-
tions within a theoretical framework, even as they describe the ways in which an unwavering
commitment to gender activism led to systemic change at all levels of the institution.
In the conclusion, Joshua Adair has gathered the topics of the collection under common
themes. He notes that ideally museums would feel like homes for ideas and objects, but he
recognizes that homes do not always convey safety or comfort. One cannot feel at home in a
place where one is not recognized – a place where one does not exist, essentially. However, if
one is recognized in a home space, there is a possibility that it might change, as many of the
institutions described in this book have done. In such cases, an unwelcoming space may have
generative potential; Sara Ahmed states that “We learn about worlds when they do not accom-
modate us. Not being accommodated can be a pedagogy. We generate ideas through the
struggles we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question”
(2017, 221). Many chapters in this volume express views of individuals who have not been
welcomed or accommodated, and who in turn refuse to accommodate mainstream readers.
Adair follows Ahmed in suggesting that these writings will spark creativity. I join him in hoping
that practitioners and other readers will take the ideas explored in this book as cautionary tales or
best practices – as appropriate – and use them in charting a future for museums that is inclusive,
engaging, and provocative, reinforcing their position as agents of social change.

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. “An Affinity of Hammers.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of
Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, 221–234. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Gossett, Reina, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton. 2017. “Known Unknowns: An Introduction to
Trap Door.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina
Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, xv–xxvi. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
21
ON GENDER FLUIDITY AND
PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITURE
Michael Petry

Previously, many in the mainstream found it difficult to imagine what a transgender, gender-
fluid,1 or intersex person looked like apart from cartoon representations, as was once also the
case for gays and lesbians. Today’s publics increasingly understand that transgender people are
not dressing up to look like a different sex or gender; transgender people are trying to address
divergences between their biological sex, their gender identity, and social constructions of sex
and gender. As depictions of transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender-fluid individuals
become more prominent in art and media, new debates emerge about the most appro-
priate and respectful ways to represent them. Jack Halberstam asserts, “the trans* body is
not so easy to represent, and the visual frame that captures such bodies either has to
reveal sites of contradiction on the gender-variant body (through nakedness perhaps,
which risks sensationalizing such bodies) or through other kinds of exposure, violent,
intrusive, or otherwise” (2018, 89). This chapter examines the complexities of creating
portraits of trans, intersex, and gender-fluid individuals by analyzing four artists’ diverse
approaches.
Historically speaking, there is a strong link between how the cis-queer community gen-
erally was perceived as other, and how the transgender community continues to be viewed
and portrayed today. When Harry Hay “conceived” of the Mattachine Society2 in 1950
(Spencer 1995, 357), homosexuals were widely considered as corrupt, dangerous, and evil.
Hay wanted the general population to understand that homosexuals were average folk who
wanted to live in peace. Yet male homosexuals were presented as campy demi-women, and
lesbians appeared as butch on the rare occasions they were depicted. Homosexuality was
treated both as a crime and a mental illness; the American Psychiatric Association classified it
as a disease until 1973, and the World Health Organization labeled transgender people as
mentally ill until June 2018 (World Health Organization 2018). As a result, LGBTQ+ indi-
viduals had little control over negative public portrayals of themselves. These stereotypes
caused (and continue to cause) psychological violence: if the core of your very being is
considered aberrant, how do you depict yourself or see yourself reflected in society’s mirror?
To complicate matters, in the art world, society’s others of any sort are underrepresented
in commercial galleries and institutional spaces. Nevertheless, in the decades since
256 Michael Petry

Stonewall, representations of gay white cisgender males have increasingly become accep-
table, even normative. Generally speaking, gay white cisgender men enjoy the privileges of
their race and sex – a few benefit further by passing as straight – as well as the economic
advantages and relative safety their position affords, though this is not universally true.
Lesbians, people of color, and bisexuals have been less well served, although they, too,
strive for recognition and inclusion.
Transgender individuals rarely benefit from these privileges; as chapter 22 in this
volume indicates, many in this population remain unemployed, while increased visibility
may only bring violence. When it comes to the arts, the cost of transitioning may make
it impossible for aspiring trans photographers to purchase equipment and supplies or to
spend the time pursuing their art. In an era when there is a cult of personality around
popular artists, gallery directors and curators may shy away from those who are changing
names and identities. Alternatively, artists of nonbinary gender may be assumed to be gay
or lesbian, feminine men or butch women, but not gender fluid, so their identities
remain misunderstood and unrecognized. These and other factors, including the limited
size of the population, restrict the number of photographers engaged in portraying indi-
viduals who identify as transgender or of nonbinary gender. Of the artists discussed in
this chapter, Del LaGrace Volcano offers a perspective on intersex, partly through self-
portraits; Artor Jesus Inkerö depicts themself as well as other trans celebrities; Blake Little, a
gay cisgender male, makes iconic images of trans people; and Åsa Johannesson revels in
gender ambiguity. Moreover, each of the artists tackles topics that are controversial within
the LGBTQ+ world, reminding mainstream populations of the heterogeneity behind the
acronym.
Del LaGrace Volcano is respected as a photographer working in gender representation since
the late 1970s. Born intersex, Volcano was raised as a girl. As an artist, Volcano is “concerned to
show gender/sex as both highly performative and intimately embodied. Herm’s work [herm is a
pronoun that Volcano and others use for self-definition] has thus spoken across nature/nurture
debates in trans, intersex, and queer studies. ... Volcano’s oeuvre has presented queer, trans, and
intersex people as subjects rather than objects, since herm’s images are created through looks of
identification, affiliation, and desire exchanged between the sitter and the photographer” (Jay
Prosser in Volcano, Prosser, and Steinbock 2015, 189–190).
For example, Volcano’s series Me, Myself & Eye consists of photographs of the artist when
herm was Debbie Wood, age three. These are mixed with those of Della Grace (1979) and
Del LaGrace Volcano (2004), depicting shifting facets of gender identity. Volcano has also
made arresting portraits of Kathy Acker, Rachel Maddow, Zanele Muholi, as well as mem-
bers of an intersex forum. Herm’s work has been widely documented and exhibited; it is a
benchmark in the field, because Volcano was one of the first to explore such issues explicitly.
Love Bites (2017) documents the fluidity of identity, desire, and female sexual play; it was
originally banned in the USA, censored in Canada, and difficult to obtain in the UK. Its
sadomasochistic content is still seen as offensive by many within and outside LGBTQ+
communities, indicating the diversity of these populations as well as Volcano’s willingness to
flout conventions regulating sex and gender. Sadomasochism is a particularly difficult topic
within certain LGBTQ+ communities, where individuals are so frequently targets of violence
that its presence in the pursuit of pleasure seems abhorrent. Clearly, like all photographic
images, Volcano’s are refracted through the artist’s social position and gender identity,
informing viewers about the artist as well as about herm’s subjects.
 Gender Fluidity and Portraiture 257

Volcano’s work serves as an introduction to images of self by Inkerö, a Finnish nonbinary

gender artist. Inkerö’s video work Bubble (2017), owned by the Kiasma Museum of Con-
temporary Art in Helsinki, is distinguished by high production values. Again, the emphasis is on
embodiment, as the video focuses on an athletic youth in a hotel. The concept of the video is
that the student has spent their art grant on workouts and protein powders to build up their
body. The youth is then seen swimming, lounging in the deluxe room, and listening to music
like a spoilt teen. The bubble referred to may be the one many privileged white cisgender young
men inhabit (and hark back to the popularity of bodybuilding magazines among gay men in the
1950s), or it may refer to the fragility of the world of working-class individuals of nonbinary
gender, who might have to choose between creating a body image and education.
Inkerö, like Volcano, flirts with performativity. Possibly the artist’s most famous work is
JUSTIN (2016), a six-by-four meter black and white photograph on PVC tarpaulin of
Inkerö as Justin Bieber in the latter’s advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear (Inkerö
2018). Inkerö poses (in both senses of the word) not only as the privileged young man, but
also as a celebrity in the public eye, appropriating an image of a popular culture star known
for his embrace of a homophobic Christian church (Too Fab Staff 2018). Inkerö has also
made similar-sized images in poses referring to the privilege of Kim Kardashian and Caitlyn
Jenner (titled KIM and CAITLYN, Inkerö 2018). These works have been widely exhibited,
like advertisements, and present the artist to a larger public without comment. In particular,
the artist’s insertion of their body in an image reminiscent of Jenner, a transgender woman
who has drawn hate for her damning comments about same-sex marriage and support for
Donald Trump, provokes debate. Is the photographer reifying the glamor of these icons, or is
Inkerö undermining them? The images stand or fall alongside similarly scaled inducements to
consume, yet all that Inkerö offers for consumption is the self. By inserting images of an
individual of nonbinary gender into iconic, larger than life representations of celebrities, the
artist reminds viewers of the instability of images, which can be interpreted in multiple ways.
In this way, Inkerö creates space for diversity.
In contrast, Blake Little works in the commercial world. He does not insert his image into
photographs of celebrities; instead, his portraits of screen stars and musicians are highly prized
by members of the Hollywood film community. His sitters include Tom Cruise, Samuel
Jackson, Jane Fonda, k.d. lang, and Jeff Bridges, none of whom are considered gender pio-
neers. His sporting world clients include Brett Favre, and he has also photographed visual
artists including Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. In these portraits, the sitters appear to be
selling themselves as a commodity or brand; there is no ambiguity about their gender. Little’s
noncommercial work has also been featured in a wide variety of media, and he has produced
books including The Company of Men (2011), Manifest (2013), and Preservation (2014).
Much of Little’s past work focuses on cisgender gay men. In The Company of Men (2011),
he aimed to document burly, hypermasculine gay men, usually in working-class occupations
that have traditionally been associated with masculinity – electricians, firemen, police offi-
cers, and football players. Little notes that many people said, “I’m so glad you did this book,”
including a fifty-year old who admitted, “I just came out and showed the book to my family
to say this is the type of gay man I am” (2018). While the men are photographed at work or
in their homes, the images are obviously constructed. Light does not just fall on an exposed
muscle to make it gleam, nor do rays of sunshine fall just so on a face as soon as someone
steps outside. Much of the masculinity presented is performative, whether a man is dressing
in leather or a jockstrap. At the same time, if one looks closely, Little’s images convey
258 Michael Petry

ambiguities and certain kinds of vulnerability. Ultimately, the photos reveal not only the
individuals’ carefully constructed selves, but also the very fact of their construction. In this
way, they echo Inkerö’s images of themself in place of celebrities.
Currently, Little is working on a photographic series titled FLUID, which depicts mem-
bers of trans and gender-fluid communities. Little, who works in Los Angeles, holds casting
calls to find subjects for this noncommercial work. Members of the Los Angeles LGBT
Center have distributed his call for sitters for this project,3 and many volunteered to partici-
pate. Little aims to “make a dynamic, powerful photo,” using controlled lighting in a studio.
He wants sitters to look their best – or at least what he considers their best – so he photo-
graphs “in beautiful light” to create a portrait that is “an iconic representation of the indivi-
dual.” For this project, Little does not dress or style the sitters as he does for commercial
shoots, “I would never bring clothes for them, but I chose with them what they should wear
(of their own clothes)” (2018). As a result, in many of the images, sitters are dressed in what
they wear to the casting call.
Nevertheless, all the images have a certain Blake Little look: they are glossy with a Hollywood
headshot format and go well beyond documentary representation. Little seeks to create an image
that is insightful yet aims to make the sitter as attractive as possible. In one image a trans male
wears a white shirt and sports an Elvis-style coif. The sitter seems to know exactly how he wants
to look and be presented. He looks very different from another subject, a trans female with
balding purple hair. A local comedian, she allowed Little greater control in the image-making
process, including removing her breast padding and changing her combover style. Little has said
of the image, “When I look at her, she looks so fluid” (2018).
Not only does Little exercise considerable control over the presentation of his subjects,
but he also provides text with the images, unlike Inkerö. As part of the project, Little
asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their identity, and the answers
accompany the images. He insists that this information be included in the labels in any
institutional setting “because photographing the breadth of fluidity, from completely trans
male or female to in-between, if the person identifies in a certain way and it’s their
description, it adds to the work, it adds to the conversation” (2018). In other words, he
does not promote ambiguity.
FLUID is still underway; Little wants to photograph individuals from different cultures and
is working with curator Wayne Baerwaldt to identify First Nations individuals in Canada to
participate. He also intends to make images in Europe. The work has yet to be exhibited in
an institutional setting, and Little is aware of the possible difficulties involved. Museum board
members and advisory councils often reject exhibitions with queer content; in addition, the
FLUID series is likely to attract questions about the extent to which a photographer who has
spent so much time photographing gay men and emphasizing masculinity can represent the
nuances of gender fluidity. The manipulation and construction of any photographic image
regardless of the artist’s gender or sexuality suggests that this question cannot be clearly or
quickly resolved.
All three of the photographers discussed above create works that have at least a touch of self-
portrait in them since artists can never fully remove themselves from their creations. Åsa Johan-
nesson, a Swedish artist living in London, identifies as of nonbinary gender and addresses issues
that have faced the three other artists; however, her work will be dealt with in greater depth
through an interview because of the ways in which she addresses aspects of the others’ work that
cause controversy. Johannesson observes, “I never refer to myself as particularly masculine or
 Gender Fluidity and Portraiture 259

feminine because it has been a natural flow from when I was a child … and I never had a super
feminine presentation. So if I would describe myself, I would say not either [one sex or gender]
or [the other]. I don’t want to place myself in a particular box.” The photographer’s flexibility
and unwillingness to be constrained by binaries allow her to explore gender in novel ways.
Gender fluidity and self-portraiture feature prominently in Johannesson’s work, espe-
cially in images that include her twin sister and are based on childhood photographs taken
by their grandfather. Exhibited in The Boy & the Twins (Fotogalleriet, Malmö, Sweden,
August-September 2011), these black and white images are mixed with color photographs
of a youth whose sex is ambiguous. Johannesson depicts the youth playing basketball,
hiking in the woods, and engaging in traditionally masculine activities. However, Johan-
nesson allows viewers to decide the youth’s sex as she, unlike Little, keeps biographical
information out of the image and its presentation. Johannesson’s portraits of herself as a
child are similarly thought-provoking, because the two siblings look very much alike, but
are not identical. Currently, Johannesson dresses and presents herself in gender-neutral
fashion, while her sister is more conventionally feminine. Johannesson is interested in the
notion of a dynamic nonbinary gender identity, rejecting transgender and cisgender as static
oppositions. Thus, many of her photo essays look at a liminal state of being.
Despite the certainty of the title, Johannesson’s Portraits of Him (2007) plays with gender
ambiguity, refusing to allow viewers to make assumptions and constantly queering expecta-
tions. Portraits of Him – which I included in the Clifford Chance law firm 2011 Pride exhi-
bition – depicts transgender men. Johannesson wants viewers to look at the works outside of
stereotypes of masculinity and femininity; the artist disrupts the viewer’s interpretations by
utilizing traditional masculine poses, yet making it impossible for the viewer to read the
person’s current or birth sex. Members of the mainstream might simply categorize the image
as queer, but Johannesson encourages further delving.
Portraits of Him features active sitters who participate in constructing the image; it is not taken.
The photographs resemble commercial headshots in some ways like Little’s portraits; studio
images, they focus on their sitters’ heads and shoulders. However, they lack the polish of self-
presentation found in commercial work. Some sitters have presumably taken hormones and
show hair on their face, chest, and back. Viewers cannot see their chests to discern if they have
had surgery or are strapped. Further ambiguity is created when Johannesson makes their images
the same size and proportions; the sitters appear to be of similar height, and their sex cannot be
intuited by relative size. The series constitutes a meditation on the meaning of him.
Looking Out, Looking in (2015) explores nonbinary gender more intentionally. The nearly
life-size images appear to confront viewers, interrupting the traditional power dynamic of the
spectator’s gaze, with its implicit gendering of male spectator and female subject. These
images are designed to raise questions about the nature of portraiture as well as about sex,
gender, and sexuality; in doing so, they may create discomfort or dissonance.
With these notions in mind, I interviewed Johannesson.
Petry (MP): Your work about transgender people is very much about saying “this is who
I am,” which is at odds with what you say about yourself.
Johannesson (AJ): The people I have photographed for Looking Out, Looking in (2015)
don’t necessarily identify as transgender. What they have in common is their idea of gender
as something that is unfixed, nonbinary. While a few of the people I have photographed
have transitioned from cisgender as women to men, not everyone is doing that. So I don’t
describe that project as a representation of transgender people.
260 Michael Petry

FIGURE 21.1 Untitled, from Looking Out, Looking in, 2015

Source: © Åsa Johannesson.

MP: How would you describe it?

AJ: First of all, I don’t want to describe the project as representational because I don’t feel
that I am representing a particular group. Before I take photographs, I say that we are making
this project on gender fluidity, on those who do not conform to gender binaries. I can’t
represent you [the sitter] because I can only represent myself. We are going to make a really
strong photograph, and that will be our photograph.
MP: So it’s about creating a fiction, because the photo is a fiction.4 It’s a fixed moment,
but also it’s about their fluid gender identity. That’s interesting in relation to how you also
identify yourself with that nonfixed identity.
AJ: Yes.
MP: How did you find the sitters?
AJ: I started the project by photographing a few friends. After that, when I had a couple
of photographs, the project almost ran itself, because it became quite well known and people
would contact me.
MP: People you didn’t know?
AJ: Yes, they contacted me through friends and said, “I want to be a part of this.” Every
time I met a new person, we had a coffee and I showed them the work I had done. I
explained that the photograph was not going to be about representation or representing a
particular group but about the idea of what a photograph could do. When you become a
photograph, it opens up this whole world of you, and you can become anything.
 Gender Fluidity and Portraiture 261

MP: Looking Out, Looking in is different from Portraits of Him, the series you showed at
Clifford Chance. Those people were all transgender men?
AJ: Yes.
MP: How did you come across those sitters?
AJ: That was an earlier period of my life, and I was thinking more about gender than I am
now. Their masculinity and what it meant was more important to me then. I wanted a pic-
ture of it, and I was going to bars and clubs where we had that queer mix – trans people and
gay people. I became friends with a few transgender men, and they introduced me to the
organization FTM London. I started to go to their meetings. But I also became friends with
them and did a couple of workshops with them. So we had this kind of exchange.
MP: Photographic workshops?
AJ: Yes, and F2M people are very open about where they are on the gender spectrum. I
always said, I don’t identify as F2M myself. It was very important for me to say that, because
I was photographing them.
MP: And they were happy with that?
AJ: Yes, they were happy about that. I took their photographs. Also, at the time (2007),
the photographs [of trans men] I had come across quite often documented a particular sub-
culture and aesthetic. These photographs were usually quite saturated and colorful. I under-
stand this aesthetic, particularly in its manifestations from the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a
reflection of the urgency of gaining a self-defined visibility apart from that of the objectified
other frequently seen in the history of photography. I’m saying that, because the aesthetic
strategy I used for Portraits of Him, soft colors, soft lights, and head and shoulder portraits in a
studio, was so different from the Looking Out, Looking in aesthetic. I was playing with the
definition of a portrait as well as with the idea of how to take a portrait. I wanted to make
beautiful photographs of these men without carrying all the heaviness of the history of
otherness, and also trying to create something new that was not just that recognizable queer
aesthetic from their subculture.
MP: At Clifford Chance, the images were almost traditional male Hollywood headshots!
They have a very different feel from your other projects which are equally constructed; your
headshots allude to a tradition.
AJ: Absolutely.
MP: Which, as you say, takes them out of the realm of the exotic, out of the space of the
queer, so a formal way of looking occurs, with us looking at them and quite often them
looking back at the camera.
AJ: They are not all looking at the camera, and one reason I tried that strategy was
because of the viewer. I wanted to make a photograph that was not instantly recognizable as
an aesthetic that viewers could place and understand. That meant as a viewer, you had to
question yourself and your own identity as a man, as a woman, as well as your sexuality. I
had lots of men, straight men and gay men, who weren’t really sure about themselves after
seeing the work. They couldn’t really place themselves. I think that worked quite well.
MP: Many gay men found the sitters sexually attractive and that kind of freaked them out.
AJ: I think so.
MP: A lot of the straight men simply assumed they were men like them (cisgender).
Looking at the images created a fluid internal state, one that most straight and gay men are
not used to. In discussion with artists and queer people of various sexes and genders, I have
found that women think about their fluidity a lot more than men.
262 Michael Petry

AJ: I think so, too.

MP: In my cis gay male community there is distrust of the idea of bisexual men. Many
believe that bisexual men are just in denial. I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure there are
bisexual men; it’s just that is an area not often depicted.
AJ: Yes, it’s a new niche [laughs]!
MP: The people who identify as gay or bisexual on television (and this is a problem with
representation in the mass media) always seem to be the –
AJ: Extremes.
MP: Extremes do make good TV! We are starting to see that with trans people and the
media depicting good and bad trans people.
AJ: I was going to bring that up actually. I made Portraits of Him in 2007, and people were
like – what? People had not heard about transgender people unless they were in the queer
community themselves. And the mainstream media had no interest in the fluidity of queer
identities. It was as if the idea of wanting to change one’s gender didn’t exist. In 2015,
everything just exploded in the mass media, and Caitlyn Jenner drew a lot of attention.
After that year, transgender was suddenly everywhere, and everyone jumped on the
bandwagon, for instance, fashion houses and model agencies. But my work began well before
this phenomenon. I was coming from a certain situation where there was still a lot of stigma,
and there was little visibility of these people in mainstream media. I wanted to present these
trans men in a powerful way, so that they could be adored! The lack of visibility has
disappeared now.
MP: Yes, now there is Transparent and a global discussion of trans issues. We have spoken
about the physical displays of Portraits of Him, but what of the semi-institutional setting of
Clifford Chance?
AJ: I enjoyed the installation there as it was not a building primarily intended as a gallery.
We decided to have text at the end of the series of works, which meant that viewers reading
the work from left to right got to enjoy the work first and then read about it. The whole
context of not being in a traditional gallery, as well as luring the viewer into the work
without declaring its content or intent, raised questions, not just on how one can show work
on queering, but ultimately on how we reach a wider audience, also outside of LGBTQI
communities.
MP: How might you display that work in a traditional museum setting?
AJ: One change would be to have different edition sizes. Those [at Clifford Chance]
were printed 50 cm x 50 cm so they were almost life size. I did that consciously because I
was interested in the encounter between the viewer and the sitter. In a museum, depend-
ing on the context, a larger scale might work better. We showed the images in a linear
sequence [at CC], and I wonder what might happen if I showed just one piece with other
museum objects.
MP: When people go to a museum, they make a conscious decision to see art. Seeing your
images at Clifford Chance surprised viewers, whereas in a museum, people expect the unexpected.
AJ: The Clifford Chance exhibition overturned many preconceptions. In a museum, there are
different issues in dealing with the institution and also the audience. Viewers’ responses at Clif-
ford Chance had the strongest effect on me of anything in the show. If I were to take it inside a
museum, I would focus on the relationship between my images and other works on display.
MP: How did you feel about the institutional differences between the show at Clifford
Chance and Looking Out, Looking in at MOCA London?
 Gender Fluidity and Portraiture 263

AJ: The works were very different and dealing with dissimilar issues.
MP: Looking Out, Looking in was about nonbinary individuals, whereas Portraits of Him focused
on fixed identities (trans men). Institutionally, what were the differences that affected you?
AJ: Portraits of Him was an eye-opener for me in terms of how I could use the expectations
inherent to the classic studio portrait to reach wider audiences. At MOCA, the physical space
forced me to work on a different scale and in a more fluid way. I see Portraits of Him not as
fixed, but more of a complete piece than Looking Out, Looking in, which is still very much in
progress. Both shows talk about what a photograph can do successfully, that is, force the
viewer to acknowledge that they are looking at a photograph, not just at a person.
MP: Do you think the institution helps focus that look? Could this happen in a
commercial space?
AJ: It would be different again, as you would have different access points to the work.
When my work sits in a commercial space, it is approached through its aesthetics and less
through its contents and aim. It becomes much more like an object.
MP: Would you ever sell this work?
AJ: Yes I would. The largest show of Looking Out, Looking in was at the Landskrona
Photo Festival in Sweden (2016), and when we were packing the show, I received an
email from one of the city’s culture ministers. He sent me a photograph of two of my
images installed in his office, and he said, “I’m going to buy them – how much do you
want?” Now they are in one of the municipal meeting rooms. But when I think about
commercial space, I think of approaches I have had from fashion magazines, and then I
must consider whether the work is just going to sit like a piece of fabric, or whether
there are politics involved. I have a responsibility not to let this work be treated from a
purely aesthetic perspective.
MP: You have said that museums are places that make categories, and you don’t want to
be put in a category.
AJ: Museums have a history of creating categories or using established categories and pla-
cing objects within them, to exist there. I wish my work would be seen as more complex
than a series of images framed within a category of, say gender, sexuality, or queerness.
MP: In the same way as a photo by a straight white cisgender man would be categorized?
AJ: Exactly! That goes for all minorities; if work is not made by a white, Western male
heterosexual, these issues always come up. The work of nondominant artists that becomes
part of a visual display within a museum is usually relegated to the boxes marked as woman,
black, queer, and such. I want to see if we can talk about this kind of work as we would
discuss art by men from the dominant population. I want to talk about the work – not just
the identity. Is that possible?

Conclusion
How institutions present and collect the work of people who are not white cisgender straight
men remains one of the core issues of our time. The work of those considered others comes
from a different position than art by those with privilege and requires different strategies for
exhibitions; ideally, institutions will present the work in a way that remains sympathetic but
critical (this challenge is also mentioned in chapter 22 of this book). The artists’ work and
words explored here illustrate the complexity and diversity – as well as the beauty – of the
extended LGBTQ+ community. Moreover, each of the photographers engages with the
264 Michael Petry

differences between commercial and artistic portraiture; with the role of the exceptional
individual within an always already marginalized queer culture; and with the positive and
negative aspects of creating controversy or even offense.
Each of these artists started their photographic journeys from different places, and they
have focused in diverse ways on ambiguity, fluidity, and identity. Their distinct perspectives
provide viewers some understanding of how difficult it is to make a photograph and docu-
ment individual experience – especially since no single photograph can ever fully represent a
self, much less a group. Institutions must now follow artists’ lead and more consistently make
imagery of transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender-fluid individuals part of their
dialogue. These artists’ endeavors make clear that relevant work of the highest quality is
available – it needs only be sought.

Notes
1 Many contributors to this book include gender-fluid or nonbinary individuals within the category of
transgender; however, I am making a distinction. For the purposes of this article, transgender individuals are
males who (wish to) present themselves as females, and females who (wish to) present themselves as
males. Their identities are based on binary notions of gender. Nonbinary and gender-fluid individuals,
as Johannesson will explain, reject the binaries, embracing ambiguity and change.
2 The Mattachine Society was one of the first gay rights organizations in the USA.
3 The flyer stated: “CASTING Transgender/Gender Fluid People. Well-known celebrity and fine art
photographer is creating a new photography project to capture the individuality, beauty and nobility of
the gender fluid and trans communities. He is creating a new portrait series celebrating nonbinary and
androgynous identities that are subverting traditional notions of masculinity and femininity and trans
individuals who represent new expressions of these old norms. We are looking for all ages and races for
this project. ... This is a paid job and you will also receive an original print from the shoot.”
4 For more on this concept as well as nonbinary difference, see chapter 14, which is by Johannesson
and Le Couteur.

References
Della Grace. 1991. Love Bites. London: Gay Men’s Press. See also Volcano below.
Halberstam, J. Jack. 2018. Trans*. Oakland: University of California Press.
Inkerö, Artor Jesus. 2018. “Selected Works.” https://artorjesusinkero.com/.
Lamont, Tom. 2015. “Interview. Russell Tovey: I Was a Scared, Skinny Little Rat.” The Guardian, March 1.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/mar/01/russell-tovey-looking-banished-interview.
Little, Blake. 2011. The Company of Men. Los Angeles, CA: Blake Little.
Little, Blake. 2018. Interview with author.
Spencer, Colin. 1995. Homosexuality: A History. London: Fourth Estate.
Too Fab Staff. 2018. “Inside Justin Bieber’s Church: Hillsong’s Culture of Homophobia and Anti-
Feminism.” Too Fab, June 18. http://toofab.com/2018/06/18/justin-bieber-hillsong-carl-lentz-se
lena-gomez-kardashian-kourtney-hailey-baldwin-homophobia-sexism-sexist-anti-feminism-feminist-
chris-pratt-religion-christianity/.
Volcano, Del LaGrace. 2018. “MAPA DEL.” www.dellagracevolcano.com/gallery/mapa-del-35846710.
Volcano, Del LaGrace, Jay Prosser, and Eliza Steinbock. 2016. “INTER*me: An Inter-locution on the
Body in Photography.” In Transgender and Intersex, Theoretical, Artistic, and Practical Perspectives, edited
by Stefan Horlacher, 189–224. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Health Organization. 2018. “ICD-11: Classifying Disease to Map the Way We Live and Die:
Small Code, Big Impact.” June 18. http://www.who.int/health-topics/international-classificatio
n-of-diseases.
22
NEVER A SMALL PROJECT: WELCOMING
TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES INTO
THE MUSEUM
Mirjam Sneeuwloper, Amy K. Levin, Colline Horstink, and
Yvo Manuel Vas Dias

Introduction (AKL)
Individuals who identify as transgender (including transsexuals and cross-dressers) were largely
invisible in museums prior to 2010. Since then, stories of transgender people have primarily
appeared in exhibitions about exceptional individuals, such as April Ashley, or as part of
broader displays on gender and sexuality, for instance, the Hide/Seek exhibition at the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. It has only been since 2015 or so that insti-
tutions have presented a broader panoply of exhibitions related to the lives of trans indivi-
duals; trans artists; or trans histories. As a result, members of transgender communities
continue to express anger and frustration, seeking further representation.
In 2015–2016, the Amsterdam Museum (formerly the Amsterdam Historical Museum)
embarked on a collaboration with local transgender communities to create an exhibition
titled Transmission, together with related programming. A distinctive facet of this exhibition
was that it kept changing while it was mounted, partly in response to reactions of community
collaborators. This chapter unites the voices of the curator and transgender individuals with
my scholarly insights to document the process of creating the exhibition, its contents, visitor
reactions, and the ways in which the collaboration has continued to benefit the community
and museum. The interactions between community members and museum staff added to the
debates over definitions of history, particularly with respect to exhibitionary institutions. The
interviewees whose comments form each part of the article are identified by their initials in
the section headers.1 In this way, the chapter serves as a case study for institutions embarking
on similar exhibitions or expanding community engagement, even as it contributes to the
theoretical base on museums and transgender inclusion.

Trans definitions (AKL)

As noted in the introduction of this book, one of the greatest challenges museums face when
creating displays related to transgender individuals lies in defining the category in a way that is
inclusive without watering it down to meaninglessness. Most museums take the stance that
266 Sneeuwloper et al.

transgender does not include many, or all, terms beginning with the prefix trans-, such as
transnational. Halberstam (2018, 4), however, proposes an asterisk in conjunction with the term,
like this – trans* – drawing from the digital domain to suggest that all possibilities should be
included. In the realm of museums, the term is almost inevitably linked to sex, sexuality, gender
expression, and/or gender identity, whether lived temporarily or on a permanent basis.
The term trans straddles binary and nonbinary gender expressions. While some adopt the
view that gender exists along a continuum, others have transitioned – or wish to do so –
moving from one end of a socially constructed binary to the other. Mel Chen indicates that
this binary is unstable because definitions of man and woman, male and female, are always
already challenged (2017, 154). The term transgender also frequently encompasses individuals
who defy binary definitions and situate themselves between or beyond male and female.
They include Clair Le Couteur and Åsa Johannesson, contributors to this book, as well as
French photographer Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore. The latter two reveled
in the freedom of gender ambiguity. To complicate matters – quite delightfully for those of
us who appreciate the complex possibilities for personal identities – there are cross-dressers
and others, all of whom must be represented in museums. Some individuals present as both
the sex and gender into which they were born most of the time, but on occasion present
as members of another sex or gender. Debates about the politics of inclusion remain
heated – for example, certain groups exclude cross-dressers – but I believe that museums as
public-serving institutions should present the full spectrum of human experience.
Culture plays into this dynamic as well. Although most individuals of European descent
subscribe to a binary notion of gender, some cultures recognize a third gender and related
categories. In Pakistan and India, communities of transgender women or hijra have existed
for hundreds of years, and among certain Native American populations a third gender
(sometimes described as two-spirit) is evident as well. While these groups may or may not
consider themselves as transgender, they are often drawn into the classification by scholars,
museum staff, and policymakers. The category intersects with decolonization as institutions
debate the extent to which white hegemonic ideologies have suppressed or altered rich
traditions of gender and sexual diversity.
Other terms and concepts related to the category of transgender are subject to debate, as
described in this book’s introduction. As authors, we acknowledge and remain sensitive to
the arguments about language; we wish it were possible to find terms that would remain
current and offend no one. Since we are unable to do so, we have selected vocabulary that
we are comfortable using within our communities and terms that appear most broadly
inclusive.

Trans and museums: A continuing story (AKL)

Recently, a growing collection of exhibitions has focused on transgender people, in cities
ranging from Prague, Czechoslovakia, to Johannesburg, South Africa. Displays have appeared
everywhere from national museums to small local galleries. Without being encyclopedic, I
will describe some institutions’ approaches to exhibitions exclusively about transgender so
readers can understand how an Amsterdam exhibit broke ground.
Notable exhibitions have concentrated on well-known individuals, creating an aura of
exceptionalism around their subjects. The Museum of Liverpool offered April Ashley: Portrait
of a Lady between 2013 and 2015, bringing renewed attention to the former Vogue model,
 Never a Small Project 267

one of the first Britons known to have had sex-reassignment surgery. Yet according to
Morgan Page, emphasis on individuals such as Ashley and Christine Jorgensen “reifies the
idea that trans people exist only as products of pharmacological-surgical processes, rather than
as people who may or may not choose to access such processes” (2017, 140). As I have dis-
cussed elsewhere (Levin 2017, 454–470), exhibitions on Claude Cahun may be problematic
because her legacy is controlled by Jersey Heritage, which has minimized the role of Cahun’s
partner Marcel Moore. In some instances, the emphasis on Moore as Cahun’s stepsister has
distracted from their sexual relationship. An approach which emphasizes an individual’s
contributions can perpetuate social inequalities, too: “certain artists are made increasingly
prominent in the cultural sphere and are upheld as exceptional,” while others, including
transgender people of color, “persist under impossible conditions” (Tang 2017, 366).
In addition to emphasizing exceptional individuals, exhibits have focused on particular
artists. Khusra: Stains and Stencils at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester in 2007, presented
Qasim Riza Shaheen’s work which reappropriated the negative Punjabi term Khusra
(originally referring to eunuchs, it is now also used to describe intersex people or trans-
gender women). Shaheen’s art is intersectional, drawing attention not only to gender, but
also to racial diversity and nationalism. The Pakistani flag often appears, as do references
to Islam and British imperialism.
More specialized exhibitions are emerging, too. Transgender, Gender, and Psychoanalysis
appeared in London’s Draper Hall in 2017 in conjunction with a conference on the same
topic. In 2018, Iziko Gallery, South Africa, featured interseXion – the art of advocacy, on
transgender sex workers. Trigger: Gender as Tool and Weapon at the New Museum of New
York (2017–2018) addressed nonbinary gender. The presence of focused exhibitions suggests
that the topic of transgender has become more acceptable. The number of people who
identify as trans male or female, or as of nonbinary gender, is sufficiently large that no single
exhibition can do the group’s heterogeneity justice. Furthermore, curators may feel com-
pelled to find a subtopic to distinguish their exhibits from previous ones and to demonstrate
that the displays are not one-off efforts to educate the mainstream public or satisfy a parti-
cular demographic. Dedicated displays demonstrate the existence of individuals who identify
as transgender in all aspects of life, breaking stereotypes that they are found predominantly in
certain careers, such as acting. A word of caution is in order, however; the existence of
more and increasingly specialized exhibits does not mean that prejudice, ignorance, and
denial have dissipated.2 Transgender community members continue to protest the lack of
accurate representation in museums and heritage sites, and staff encounter resistance to
exhibitions on transgender topics from colleagues, governing boards, donors, members of
the general public, and local authorities. In addition, specialized exhibitions may have too
narrow a focus for curators to collaborate actively with community members; they may
reinforce the authority of the curator rather than the experiential knowledge of the
individual, official versions of history over the immediacy of personal storytelling.
Exhibitions which focus on narrow topics or popular figures may increase the isolation and
invisibility felt by “ordinary” transgender people. Yet exhibitions on the everyday lives of
transgender individuals pose unique challenges. It might seem that collecting quotidian items
would be straightforward and that individuals would be uniformly eager to see their lives
represented. The case is not so simple. Few museums possess (or realize that they possess)
historical items that illustrate transgender lives, again, with the exception of wealthy or well-
known people. And when individuals agree to participate in transgender exhibitions, they
268 Sneeuwloper et al.

often share the experiences of other marginalized communities, which find themselves
engaged in a false partnership, patronized by professionals (Lynch 2011). Individuals who have
faced discrimination and indifference may not trust possessions to institutions that have ignored
their history; they may also fear exposure of themselves or their families if they participate. Sara
Davidmann’s project, Ken. To Be Destroyed, offers an example. Davidmann discovered photo-
graphs, letters, and other documents revealing that her deceased uncle Ken was transgender.
Her artworks based on family photographs have been exhibited in Berlin and London. Yet
they expose and appropriate Ken’s story. The public has been mostly positive about the project
(Halberstam 2018, 73–75; Rosenberg 2016), but Stephen Clarke differs: “such intimate cor-
respondence provokes unease in the understanding that this dialogue was not meant for
anyone else but Hazel [Ken’s wife]. . . . Would Ken have wanted his – and Hazel’s – story told
or would he have preferred the archive ‘to be destroyed’?” (2018).
Last, but not least, when museums wish to depict the lives of “ordinary” individuals who
identify as transgender, their work is complicated by the fact that objects are not implicitly
gendered, but derive their gender from individuals who use them or how they are used. A
compression bandage could be applied by anyone, but a woman in transition might employ
the dressing as a chest binding. The outgoing message on an answering machine becomes
iconic as the last recording of a voice that has been changed by medical technologies. Stories
of objects and intangible memories become critically important. Chris Vargas has addressed
this challenge since 2013 with his Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MoTHA),
currently lacking a site (Vargas 2017, 121–134). Vargas’s Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects is a
dynamic, evolving visual installation that has mined archives at places it has visited, such as
Victoria, British Columbia (“MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas present: Trans Hirstory in 99
Objects” 2018). Archival work is critical because some objects remain miscategorized or
unidentified, perpetuating invisibility (see chapters 5 and 16 in this collection).
In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Museum was not the first to mount an exhibition on
transgender. In 2012–2013, the Dolhuys Museum in Haarlem launched Ik M/V (I – M/F) to
challenge stereotypes and pose questions: “What makes a man a man and a woman a
woman? Is there anything in between” (Dolhuys 2018). This phrasing implies a desire to
titillate and a rhetoric of uncertainty about the existence of categories such as intersex. The
Dolhuys offered opportunities to converse with transgender individuals (Conijn 2012), but
the focus was not on building lasting relationships with community members.
In contrast, the Transmission exhibition was designed to involve and bring visibility to
transgender individuals. Some strategies for this exhibit built on existing practices. However,
this was the first time the museum adopted them for a show exclusively on transgender, and
many other approaches were new. The exhibition began with images of Miep, a well-known
individual within a particular trans community, created by distinguished photographers
Milette Raats and Koos Breukel. The photographs offered a basis for conversations about
transgender. As it progressed, the emphasis on the daily lives of transgender people increased.
Community involvement was high, and none of those interviewed cited strong criticism of
the collaboration. One interviewee, transgender historian Alex Bakker, expressed reserva-
tions, preferring a more “professional” approach: “For me, it showed the downside to this
kind of audience participation: the risk of low quality exhibitions because of depending too
much on your audience for bringing in objects. A museum should not become a community
center.” His reservations have not deterred him from working with the institution on other
projects. Certainly, some aspects of history were minimized. An example is the Free University
 Never a Small Project 269

of Amsterdam’s medical center, which opened a specialized clinic in 1979 promoting sex reas-
signment surgery and supporting transgender people. The historical significance of this center
was not emphasized by community members involved in the exhibit who valued the personal
over the institutional, a holistic understanding of transgender over a medicalized model.
Nevertheless, Transmission exemplifies a successful collaboration between and among an
institution and transgender communities, leading to long-term engagement.

The development of Transmission (MS)

The museum recognized sexual diversity with a 1989 exhibition titled It’s Good to be on the
Wrong Side, the “wrong side” being slang for homosexuality. When the project ended, the
materials and concepts were not incorporated into permanent exhibitions, yielding an
impression to some in the community that the museum was not deeply committed to the
population. At the time, the museum’s connection to those who identified as transgender
might superficially be characterized as the kind of paternalistic engagement identified by
Lynch (2011) in her study of British institutions. This was ironic because the guest curators
were LGBTQ+ community members who actively sought input. The exhibition had long-
term benefits, including related events outside the museum and increased collections
research related to LGBTQ+ histories. In the mid-2010s, the Amsterdam Museum
administration, which had been committed to exhibitions on social issues from a historical
perspective since the mid-1970s, sought a more permanent recognition of diversity in the
city today, which implicitly relied on collaboration. At this time, the political discourse in
the Netherlands was driven by a commitment to emancipation, and the museum approa-
ched its communities as equals. The primary interest was in religious, sexual, and ethnic
diversity; transgender was not yet perceived as a subject for an exhibition on its own.
By 2014, discussions regarding transgender individuals and rights were more common in
Dutch society. On July 1, 2014, a law came into effect that allowed individuals to register a
change from male to female (or vice versa) through a relatively simple process at their town hall.
Previously, many were deterred because physical transitions were required for making gender
identity changes official. The museum had already started working with transgender groups and
individuals by this point; the time seemed ideal for planning an exhibition related to the topic.
The museum invited members of several transgender groups to participate, and some were cri-
tical because they did not see Miep, depicted in the central photographs, as a typical representa-
tive of their community. Without the images, however, the exhibition had no core.
To involve more people and respond to the criticism, the museum issued an open call for
individuals and group representatives to participate in weekend roundtables. The meetings
were held behind closed doors to protect participants’ privacy. Community members were
willing to assist because they had an extensive history of having to explain themselves in an
effort to be understood, and they were aware that the exhibition would reach a broad
audience. These participants did not necessarily know each other;3 the opportunity to create
new and stronger networks was an unexpected positive outcome. Individuals began having
dinners and participating in events together, at the museum and elsewhere.
Ideas for events began to emerge as professionals and community members shared different
kinds of expertise. The most popular idea was to make the exhibition a meeting place where
members of transgender communities could tell their stories. Certain cafés, clubs, and restaurants
were gathering places for transgender people, and community collaborators suggested that a
270 Sneeuwloper et al.

replica of one of these spaces be created in the gallery. A table from one of the cafés was displayed
on a platform in the exhibition. On Fridays between 2pm and 3pm, this table was moved to the
floor. Even though it was ordinarily a violation of museum regulations, coffee and tea were
served in the gallery to make the event more welcoming. Each week, a different group within
the larger transgender community would be represented, and passersby could sit, ask questions,
and participate in the discussion. This event often lasted beyond the allotted hour until the
museum’s closing time – one example of how the staff had to adapt and be flexible.
Most visitors claimed that they did not come to the museum solely for these events, but the
discussions made them think about a controversial topic from new perspectives. For exhibition
staff, the table talks and exhibition raised questions about audiences. They had to balance the
interests of two target audiences – the transgender community and passersby. They also had to
weigh a common question within the context of this particular project: are exhibitions intended
for audiences who already know about a topic or for those who are ignorant? How are these
needs balanced when those in the know have long been marginalized, and those who are
uninformed are mainstream audiences consisting of more regular visitors? Participants such as
Yvo Manuel Vas Dias were positive about the balance: “It was a win-win situation; the museum
had an educational event, and we could talk about our organization as well as ourselves.”
Ultimately, there were several versions of the exhibition, because visitors’ and participants’
responses led to change. After the focus on Miep, everyone wanted to share their story, and
the second version was somewhat cacophonous.
The third version was more popular and focused strongly on the millennial generation.
This iteration of the display held approximately twenty-five objects accompanied by stories

FIGURE 22.1Transmission exhibition. Amsterdam Museum, June 17–September 18, 2016

Source: Photograph by Caro Bonink. Courtesy of the Amsterdam Museum.
 Never a Small Project 271

relating to groups or individuals. The museum showed Trans* Tapes, made by a collective of
three young trans artists, and short clips from Trans-Anders (or Trans Different), a doc-
umentary about middle-aged and older individuals who referred to themselves as transgender
or cross-dressers. Members of transgender communities made their own ninety-second audio
recordings, only two of which used pseudonyms. These did not have the professional quality
of typical museum audio tours, but the personal, emotive content reached many visitors. I
had worked for museums for about fifteen years, and the first time I saw a member of the
public tearing up occurred when that person was listening to a recording.
Other aspects of the exhibition forced us to reconsider common museum standards. The
older generation in the transgender community possessed self-published magazines that were
not of the print quality we prefer to put on display. Our first impulse was to turn them
down, but we realized that the magazines contained individuals’ stories, and we should
accept them to be true to our agreement to work as equals. We had so many of these
magazines that visitors were allowed to take them, but no one read them in the gallery. They
removed the magazines surreptitiously and read them privately; from this, we deduced that
the exhibition was visited by people who were in the closet or considered the subject taboo.
Members of the older generation commented that they learned about themselves and figured
out questions related to anonymity in their own way.
Initially, the transgender communities involved did not represent much racial or ethnic
diversity; however, in 2015, the groups took the lead in seeking out individuals who repre-
sented multiple cultures within Amsterdam. Several of these individuals, whom the museum
might not have located on its own, have remained involved. From this point on, the
museum started to look at the subject from an increasingly intersectional point of view, with
the 2018 Pride program more diverse than ever before.

The dynamic exhibition (CH)

Since 2002, I have attended Transgenders Amsterdam meetings, and since 2015, I have been
one of the group’s hosts. In 2015, I heard about the Amsterdam Museum project and asked
to participate. I wanted to contribute to further develop my female identity and to meet
others in the field. I want to be somebody who does something, who means something.
Broadening the female part of my identity is very satisfying – learning by living.
Sneeuwloper pulled us in, asking for input and sharing information. We were involved in the
Friday conversations; I participated several times and met interesting people. In that setting, I
could open the eyes of others. I compared the reactions to individuals who identify as transgen-
der to the attention received by individuals with disabilities. We all want to be treated as
“normal” human beings. I also assisted at the opening and participated in other activities. A col-
league from my Amsterdam transgender association organized a lecture for 180 students from the
University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht. I took a student wearing a hijab as an example:

when you go out, you know people will look at you … and many people don’t approve
of it. ... It is exactly what I have to face. People can identify the male in me through my
voice and shoulders. You other students, when you’re too fat, or you’re too small, or
you’re in a wheelchair, your difference can be remarked on by others. We share that. The
problems I have faced are not so different from the problems of other people. ... I am
never offended because I am quite stable, and I’m there, and I’m open. I never hide. It’s
272 Sneeuwloper et al.

good for the people I meet. They don’t have to be cautious for me. They can react the
way they feel. By freeing myself, I set them free, too.

The exhibition gave me an opportunity to raise my voice.

The exhibition was unusual not only in its subject, but also in the way it was dynamic.
Two small exhibition spaces were available, and Sneeuwloper asked for advice on what could
be done there. I proposed changing one room each month. The exhibition that was not in
the lead one month could move into the lead the next, along with a different display. The
exhibitions would create a story that grew deeper and more complex. People could come
back to see new things and different relations among objects.
For the second part, beginning in January 2016, I proposed including a painting by Dorien
Plaat, who strongly shows the combination of vulnerability and power in men transitioning into
women. I chose the painting to display because Plaat captured the individual’s self-consciousness
in a private space, the person he is making of himself. Plaat touched a very protected place. I
made a recording to accompany the painting, and Plaat’s friends stated that they understood her
work better from her inclusion in the exhibition. The museum’s willingness to consider my
opinion demonstrates the extent to which community members were involved.
Our collaboration continues. Partly, I miss Sneeuwloper, who has become a friend. I see her
on some of my trips into the city. I told her about my family. I also value the continuing colla-
boration. In August 2018, Transgenders Amsterdam met in the museum a part of Pride activities.
The museum exhibits a panel depicting the location of our first meetings. The nameplate on the
meeting room’s door is in the museum’s collection, although initially it was not tagged as being
related to transgender.4 Sneeuwloper also shares job postings with participants, because many
transgender people have difficulty finding appropriate employment.5
For me, the best part of the experience was the cooperation with the museum and other
transgender communities. There were genuine requests for our contributions, and the exhi-
bition took shape from our ideas. Sneeuwloper facilitated events for us during the exhibition,
ensuring that rooms were available. The way we became involved in this exposition is the
best way for a museum to connect with society. The staff receive instant feedback; they can
obtain loans from participants; and participants bring spectators to the museum. The per-
sonnel of the museum have the opportunity to grow close with collaborators. We also con-
nected with others in the project. Koos Breukel, one of Miep’s photographers, has become a
friend. I asked him to photograph technicians like me creating products with their hands.
The world is drawn into the museum, even as it expands outwards, and that is a good thing.

Communities and the museum (YVD)

As the founder of TransAmsterdam and Amsterdam TransPride, I work full-time for the trans-
gender community. The museum sought community partners; our team decided to work with the
museum as an organization, rather than as individuals. We felt honored to work with such a large
institution, but the process of exhibition creation also expanded the museum’s boundaries. From
my perspective, the museum’s representatives wanted to engage with trans communities on a dif-
ferent level than previously – truly work with and listen to our communities. Before, it was very
difficult for them. This time, they opened the doors and welcomed engagement on multiple levels.
Sneeuwloper is devoted to our communities. She was excited about learning from the project,
which she initially approached from her role as an educator. Museum processes can be slow and
 Never a Small Project 273

convoluted, but Sneeuwloper understood that our small organization needed to move quickly at
times. To this day, she informs us about relevant events or opportunities. She is a great ally and
also a friend. Even though the Amsterdam Museum is an institution with layers of hierarchy,
everybody was helpful, including the sound person, curator Annemarie den Dekker, and director
Judikje Kiers. The latter was extremely enthusiastic about our collaboration.6 If we asked for
something and the staff could do it, they agreed. Other times, they would say, “we can’t do this,
but we can do this other thing.” We also learned that certain tasks had to be completed formally
and more professionally; in other words, we exchanged knowledge and shared expertise.
Working on the exhibition made us proud that we became an important part of the institution
in such a short time. I felt very much a member of the museum community. We all contributed
in various ways. I lent my razor, recording a story about it and my relationship with my father,
who gave it to me. Another person loaned a hormone injection and gel, together with bindings
and a shirt. We recorded our stories in the studio, explaining how we are treated, and the staff
placed everything in small cases, so people could hear the stories accompanying the objects.
In most of the exhibit, trans men and trans women had equal representation. The photographs
of Miep shifted the balance toward transgender women.7 I encouraged my team to make trans
men as visible as possible, so other trans men could find us. This was essential because one of our
primary goals in participating was to provide information and networking both to the public at
large and to individuals like ourselves. Three ambassadors from Amsterdam TransPride attended
the opening. After the exhibition closed, we gained positive attention from another Amsterdam
TransPride event and a TransPoetry evening in the museum.
The first Amsterdam TransPride flag is special, but after the exhibition closed, we offered it
to the museum on long-term loan, both to confirm our relationship and to make the item
more visible. Later, the museum asked TransAmsterdam to donate the flag to the permanent
collection. We agreed, with the provision that the flag would be returned for special occa-
sions. At the transfer ceremony, there was a forum discussion, and then we handed the flag to
the director of the museum and the deputy mayor of Amsterdam. The museum possesses
other items related to our group, which you can see on the website. Their openness to
contributions furthered our alliance and offered an opportunity to preserve our story.
I hope collaborations with the museum will continue. Our organization is young, but as trans-
gender individuals we have much history. However, most of Amsterdam considers us recent his-
tory. Maybe in ten years we can create a larger exhibition. We need role models; we need people
whom we know. Maybe the exhibition will reach someone in a bakery or a housekeeper who is
trans. The media know about drag and about transgender in general, but they almost always refer
to trans women. We can improve the balance. Trans women are more likely to be killed or raped,
but we have to talk about the problems of trans men and those who identify as of nonbinary
gender. Transgender men face different health problems than trans women, including increased
risk of certain cancers or the effects of testosterone treatments. If we don’t show each other and
society at large that all of us exist and have specific concerns, nobody will know about them.
Government and health care organizations will not be able to help. Projects like Transmission ensure
that the public learns of our existence, understands our needs, and values our contributions.

Lasting effects (MS)

The exhibition broke new ground in transgender programming, and our efforts strengthened the
institution. Our planning began before theoretical discourses on transgender rights were
274 Sneeuwloper et al.

widespread in the Netherlands. Project staff had access to some theory and data, but our primary
aim was for transgender people to be heard. The institution made changes at the request of
community members, and internal controversy erupted at times as we adapted to working clo-
sely with transgender groups and individuals. The effects of the exhibition were felt beyond the
galleries with the conversion to gender-neutral toilets timed to coincide with it. The Van
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven together with a network including other institutions in some ways
led with displays on queer themes (see chapters 10 and 23 for additional information on this
network); however, the museum had not converted its toilets yet. We had to move forward by
listening carefully as well as relying on instinct and experience.
At every step, we were more successful than anticipated. Twice as many visitors as we had
expected attended the opening. One teacher brought nearly two hundred students. While
this was not our largest exhibition, the staff realized that this was never a small project outside
the museum and within the communities. Family members came to see the exhibition, and
individuals networked at the opening more than usual. Municipal employees discussed
available services with transgender individuals. In this way, the event confirmed our
commitment to serve all the city’s populations and not only traditional museum visitors.
Social media provided an avenue for comments, because individuals could maintain anonymity.
We received only one serious written complaint, and there were a few minor complaints, but the
museum did not confront the level of opposition that almost closed Hide/Seek in Washington, DC.
The stereotype of the Netherlands as a haven for sexual diversity was not necessarily the reason for
this acceptance, as a significant portion of the nation’s population is conservative.
Our commitment to collaborating with communities meant that we had to reconsider our
acquisitions policies and be cautious about serving as gatekeepers. When the exhibition
ended, our acquisitions committee requested advice on objects that should be retained for the
permanent collection. We asked those involved to recommend three objects and make a case
for their inclusion. Generally, the first item selected was related to the individual’s story,
indicating that person’s desire to be recognized or remembered. The second item was asso-
ciated with someone who was close to the individual. The third object was selected with
more reflection and emotional distance; it taught us what communities valued.
While the exhibition has closed, the institution remains committed to the transgender
population within its goals of expanding community exhibitions and continually increasing
diversity in its narrative of the city’s history. Planning for TranScreen 2017 exemplifies this
point: we convened a reflection group with someone from every department, including
curators, security officers, and accountants. I did not invite team leaders because I wanted
feedback from those likeliest to interact with the public. The reflection group enabled us to
ask diverse people about our plans; seek feedback on the selection of films; and discuss how
best to treat audiences. We encouraged members of the staff to develop their own strate-
gies, and the security team was particularly excited about providing a welcome. The film
festival drew a crowd that was younger and edgier than most visitors, and the welcome
they received will help expand our audience.
Another example of continuing engagement is that for the past few years we have hosted
Amsterdam Pride in the museum courtyard. The event is organized by COC, a Dutch
LGBTQ+ organization, and we are increasing collaboration on the content. COC appointed
Katie Poltz as cocurator, and I represent the museum. This results in a schedule rich with
trans programming, because we have built such a high level of trust with transgender organizations,
and our site is perceived as a neutral, and therefore welcoming, place.
 Never a Small Project 275

We are also using our networks to expand our human rights social justice work. In November
2017, we invited representatives of political parties for tours of the main Amsterdam gallery led
by members of LGBTQ+ communities. The T was truly visible. Politicians saw what is hap-
pening in our museum, and the lives of transgender individuals were made visible through stories
related to objects which might not initially appear connected to gender or sexuality. This was not
the first project where networking was important to the museum, but the events reflect a
heightened emphasis on transgender and on bringing people into the museum as well as reaching
out to them. In planning, we emphasize the question, “what can we contribute” to communities
within our reach, rather than “what kind of project” to do next. This avoids the attitude that
museums must have a checklist of topics related to diversity, which leads to one-off exhibitions
rather than a genuine, prolonged commitment to marginalized groups. Our model is about
connections, and the transgender groups involved in the exhibition remain in touch and mentor
each other. The museum offered opportunities for them to meet, but they did the work them-
selves. In addition, outsiders are seeking the museum’s help in creating meaningful connections
with transgender communities.
An American tourist who viewed part of TranScreen felt “welcome because at home … the
only one who knows [I am transgender] is my partner.” At our museum, he could see films about
people who shared similar experiences. Ultimately, despite challenges and controversies, the project
succeeded in strengthening a sense of community among individuals who often perceive them-
selves as outcasts, even as it educated others about gender diversity. Simultaneously, it served as a
model for how an institution can enact its commitment to community engagement.

Conclusion: But not the last word (AKL)

The Transmission exhibition, accompanying activities, and relationships between the trans-
gender communities and the city museum developed as other institutions mounted their first
exhibitions on transgender. Like the efforts described in Malone’s chapter of this book, col-
lecting for Transmission affirmed and strengthened community ties. The exhibition implicitly
took a stance in debates about the importance of the contemporary in history museums,
illustrating how community groups might not select or emphasize events and objects that
strike professional historians or gender scholars as most significant.
Initially, the Amsterdam Museum used an approach that is common in museum exhibi-
tions on LGBTQ+ topics – focusing on an exceptional individual. With increased commu-
nity engagement and a willingness to change the exhibit’s emphasis on photography after it
opened, it shifted the focus toward the everyday experiences of individuals who identify as
transgender. This allowed for a broad definition of the subject, including not only those who
have transitioned, but also people who identify as of nonbinary gender or who present as
cisgender on a regular basis. Over time, the cultural diversity of the group grew. Community
members developed remarkable trust in the museum at a time when some transgender indi-
viduals fear that publicity will provoke violence against them (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton
2017, xv). Heightened visibility strengthened transgender communities and educated the
mainstream public about a group that has been in the city for centuries.
The exhibition enabled the museum to enhance its collection of relevant materials, both
through donations from those whose possessions were on display and through participants’ advice
on acquisitions. Significantly, transgender organizations and individuals reported positive views of
the institution and particularly of the educator/curator with whom they worked. Julius Thissen,
276 Sneeuwloper et al.

an interviewee and guest curator for Trans* Objects, part of TranScreen, suggests that the
enthusiasm and egalitarian attitude of Sneeuwloper and her colleagues were essential: “They …
listened very closely to our visions, needs, and thoughts. . . . I could sense that she [Sneeuwloper]
has a strong ambition to create an inclusive and equal space, in which the opinions of a guard are
just as relevant and important as those of a manager. This isn’t something I see often. Also,
Sneeuwloper was very willing to learn about equality, intersectionality, and inclusivity.” In con-
trast, Bakker compared the treatment of participants to “hugging somebody to death” in his
interview, a reminder that excessive enthusiasm can make individuals feel outside the norm,
although he continues to work positively with Sneeuwloper and other museum employees.
The museum’s heightened and more visible inclusion of transgender communities was
beneficial, bringing networking opportunities and municipal services to transgender indivi-
duals. Participants did not regard the museum’s efforts as token or temporary, nor did they
perceive themselves to be patronized. In fact, the museum’s commitment to one form of
diversity was seen as a mark of broader dedication to human rights. Thissen commented,
“knowing that the Black Archives [of Amsterdam] has a special relationship with this
museum gave me confidence that this would turn out to be a great collaboration.” Spillover
of this kind was also apparent when people who collaborated on Transmission continued to
work with Imara Limon, a curator specializing in race and decolonization.
Future research will determine the extent to which the presence of an individual such as
Sneeuwloper, who takes primary responsibility for a collaboration and engages with individuals
on personal as well as professional levels, is a requisite, and the extent to which an institution’s
commitment to transforming itself at every level is essential. It will also be important to learn
from institutions elsewhere whether successful collaboration with one marginalized group affects
their ability to engage with other minorities. For now, it is imperative to recognize that at a time
when the discourse in Museum Studies frequently turns to the importance of empathy and the
necessity for activism, the Amsterdam Museum has provided both by creating an atmosphere in
which learning is mutual and valued; communication is heard; and individuals are respected.

Notes
1 Mirjam Sneeuwloper provided Amy Levin with a list of transgender individuals who had been involved
in the exhibit or transgender programming at the museum, and Levin connected with everyone who
responded to an initial email asking for an interview. Using a snowball methodology, she also contacted
transgender people who were recommended by interviewees, though not everyone agreed to be quoted
or named. In the interests of brevity, this chapter focuses primarily on interviews with representatives of
two community groups. The authors recognize the limitations and benefits of oral history methodologies.
Text by Mirjam Sneeuwloper and community members Yvo Manuel Vas Dias and Colline
Horstink was collected through in person interviews with Amy Levin, who transcribed the material
and edited the English for clarity. Alex Bakker and Julius Thissen responded to questions via email.
To ensure that the content remained true to speakers’ intentions, Levin offered coauthors opportu-
nities to correct the text. Our intent was to disrupt the tradition in which scholars have primacy
while collaborators are given minimal roles and to mirror the level of collaboration in the exhibit.
We are committed to telling the story in English in order to reach a large audience.
2 Violence against trans people, especially members of racial minorities, has increased in certain places
(Lees 2018).
3 Colline Horstink is with Transgenders Amsterdam, and Yvo Manuel Vas Dias is the founder of Trans-
Amsterdam and Amsterdam TransPride. Their sections of this chapter represent the views of their
constituencies, allowing us to draw broader conclusions about the success of the exhibition.
 Never a Small Project 277

4 Mirjam Sneeuwloper comments that since the sign has been tagged this way, it is listed under the
adult pedophile category as well as under gay and bisexual men. The object’s complex associations
are described in a blog entry (Bakker 2018).
5 The effort to help participants find employment springs from an understanding that inclusion
begins with the personal; the workforce will benefit from access to the perspectives of transgender
individuals. However, to date, no hires have resulted from these efforts.
6 When I interviewed Vas Dias, the museum lent us a room. On our way, we passed the director’s
office, and Vas Dias stopped to say hello. The warmth in the director’s voice was unmistakable
evidence of the egalitarian nature of the individuals’ relationship.
7 Others debated this point. Sneeuwloper suggests that trans men and women were equally represented;
Transmission included trans men of various ages, whose narratives focused mostly on objects. In con-
trast, women were likelier to be subjects of photographs and paintings, yielding an impression that their
stories dominated. The emphasis on binary identities may have left others feeling underrepresented.

References
Bakker, Alex. 2018. “Thea Wickel, Amsterdamse transgenderpionier achter gesloten deuren.” Het Hart
(Amsterdam Museum blog), May 17. https://hart.amsterdam/nl/page/447873/thea-wickel-amster-
damse-transgenderpionier-achter-gesloten-deuren.
Chen, Mel Y. 2017. “Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet.” In
Gossett, Stanley, and Burton, 147–159.
Clarke, Stephen. 2018. “Book Review. Ken. To Be Destroyed.” Open Eye Gallery. http://openeye.
eb8ed2d64b8c9f1bad624a885-10954.sites.k-hosting.co.uk/v2/blog/book-review-ken-to-be-destroyed/.
Conijn, Caspar. 2012. “Ik, m/v.” Be-hance, September 29. https://www.behance.net/gallery/
5323785/Ik-MV.
Dolhuys/Museum van de Geest. 2018. “Ik M/V.” https://www.hetdolhuys.nl/tentoonstellingen/ik-mv/.
Gossett, Reina, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds. 2017. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and
the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Halberstam J. Jack. 2018. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland:
University of California Press.
Lees, Paris. 2018. “We’re in the Midst of an Epidemic of Violence Against Transgender People.” The
Guardian, January 22. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/epidemic-vio-
lence-transgender-people-experienced-stonewall.
Levin, Amy K. 2017. “‘I Will Freely Circulate in the Intermediate Space’: Cahun and Moore’s Resis-
tance to Gender and National Boundaries.” In Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants in
Museums and Archives, edited by Amy K. Levin, 154–170. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lynch, Bernadette. 2011. Whose Cake is it Anyway? A Collaborative Investigation into Engagement and
Participation in 12 Museums and Galleries in The UK. London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation. https://www.
phf.org.uk/publications/whose-cake-anyway/.
“MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas present: Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects.” 2018. Henry Art Gallery. https://
henryart.org/exhibitions/motha-and-chris-e-vargas-present-trans-hirstory-in-99-objects.
Page, Morgan M. 2017. “Out from the Vaults: Gossip, Access, and Trans History-Telling.” In Gossett,
Stanley, and Burton, 135–146.
Rosenberg, David. 2016. “Re-imagining an Uncle’s Secret Transgender Life in the 1950s.” Slate, April 11.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2016/04/11/sara_davidmann_reimagines_a_transgender_uncle_s
_life_in_ken_to_be_destroyed.html.
Shaheen, Qasim Riza. 2007. Khusra: Stains and Stencils. Manchester: Shisha.
Vargas, Chris E. 2017. “Introducing the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.” In Gossett,
Stanley, and Burton, 121–134.
23
“A MUSEUM CAN NEVER BE QUEER
ENOUGH”: THE VAN ABBEMUSEUM
AS A TESTING GROUND FOR
INSTITUTIONAL QUEERING
Anne Rensma, Daniel Neugebauer, and Olle Lundin

Introduction and definitions

Audiences wander through galleries and read information about paintings off of each other’s
colorful clothing instead of wall labels. A urinal challenges visitors to think about what it
means to be in a restroom open to all genders. An empty stage is flanked by two monitors
showing provocative videos. An online glossary of queer terms asks more questions than it
answers. These innovations and others have accompanied systemic change at the Van
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The institution has deliberately transformed
itself in order to become a leader among museums promoting queer inclusion.
The Van Abbemuseum has gained an international reputation as an experimental and
welcoming institution under the directorship of Charles Esche, who has moved the museum
toward a radically queer path. In fact, this chapter’s title, “A Museum Can Never Be Queer
Enough,” is Esche’s reply to the question of whether the Van Abbe should engage in
“queering the museum” (2014). We will describe and analyze this journey within a theore-
tical framework and in relation to what the museum refers to as its de-practices. De-practices
question past processes and structures, unsettling normativity and instituting a kind of
deviance. For us, deviance is a positive outcome of self-reflection:

Deviance necessarily involves challenging long-held institutional, racial, geo- and bio-political
assumptions. We understand the prefix “de” in deviance in relation to notions of demo-
dernizing, decolonizing, deprivileging, or decentralizing – key strategies we hope to continue
to explore. We also understand deviance as an opportunity to reflect on the manner in which
we approach our own practices and protocols: questioning past suppositions, hierarchies, and
modes of working might be one way to institute deviance. At the same time, deviance should
also concern itself with how we find paths through the present and towards the future.
(Van Abbemuseum 2018)

In its commitment to deviance, the staff has developed a practical approach to institu-
tional queering, which has significantly affected the museum’s spaces as well as its
 “A Museum Can Never Be Queer Enough” 279

strategies governing communication, education, research, and mediation. For us, the term
mediation alludes to:

the full range of tools and resources used to forge a relationship between the visitor and a work
of art: exhibitions, catalogues and the work of curators are the most important facets of the
museum’s cultural mediation, but the term also applies to lectures and guided tours, workshops,
and installations in the museum itself. In short: the many channels for conveying information to
the visitor, and which underpin and inform his or her encounter with the works of art.
(Louvre-DNP 2010)

We use this definition throughout this essay as we draw attention to the Van Abbe’s multiple
approaches to queering the museum and rendering it more welcoming to all populations.
Our formulation of queering is based in part on Alana Kumbier’s Ephemeral Material:
Queering the Archive, in which she cites Eve Sedgwick’s “open mesh of possibilities”:

The “open mesh” that “queer” enables extends beyond the realm of gender and sexuality to
address dimensions of identification and discourses of identity that intersect with gender and
sexuality, including race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and dis/ability. It is important to hold
these possibilities in mind when we use queer - that it’s not a consolidation, or an edgy way
to say LGBT, but instead a recognition of that open mesh - a shorthand for referring to the
multitude of identifications, experiences and discourses that emerge in and from the daily
lives of people who experience themselves, outside of, and in tension with a number of
normalizing forces, like neo-liberal or capitalist socio-economic orders, or oppressive social
practices and structures - including racism, colonialism, sexism, ableism, and classism.
(Kumbier 2009, 6–7)

Our chapter explores underlying theoretical and philosophical foundations of the practice of
queering the Van Abbe and connects them to the space of the museum. Our argument
addresses the following questions: What does “queer enough” actually mean? And what are
the material and intellectual conditions that fostered this initiative in queer practice?
We have structured our argument around three overlapping thematic clusters and their
inherent tensions: disidentification and failure; space and disruption; mediation and
deviancy. We will start by presenting the initial strategies the museum used to define
appropriate themes and incorporate intersectional thinking into its work. In the following
section, we will reflect on the radical potential of art in general, as well as in the specific
context of the Van Abbemuseum. We will introduce José Esteban Muñoz’s theories of
disidentification (1999) with the aim of demonstrating how the museum is potentially a site
for negotiating new, more expansive views of identity. A requisite for these negotiations is
an understanding of the ways in which binary notions of perfection and failure marginalize
certain identities and bodies. Next, we will analyze how artworks interact with the envir-
onment they inhabit. In this section, we will explore ways of disrupting normative
dynamics imposed on spaces, discussing examples from our practice. In a discussion of
mediation, we present queering as reconstructing and – maybe more importantly – retell-
ing stories in a more inclusive way. To conclude, we stress the importance of collaboration
and change at all levels of the institution. We propose that the combination of deviancy in
the arts, the disruption of normative dynamics in an institutional space, and a radical queer
280 Rensma et al.

approach to cultural mediation provide the necessary tools for structural change within a
human rights framework. We perceive this change as continuous, and not a token or
temporary endeavor.

Laying the groundwork

The Van Abbemuseum project Queering the Collection started in 2015. It was derived from a
national initiative called Queering the Collections initiated by IHLIA (International Homo
Lesbian Information Center and Archive) in Amsterdam (IHLIA 2018).1 Daniel Neuge-
bauer, at the time head of Marketing, Mediation, and Funding, understood that the
museum could benefit from, and contribute to, national discussions around the topic and
led the museum in joining the network. As we will demonstrate, this engagement with
queering, which had both internal and external aspects, led to a new understanding of the
(re)generative potential of deviancy and failure in the arts.
As the project began, the museum explored deviant, queer, and feminist interventions.
Sociologist Alice Venir compiled a theoretical text that functioned as a foundation for
Queering the Collection by recommending an approach and outlining key themes: “An
intersectional approach towards queer individualities is fundamental to acknowledge privi-
lege and oppression within gay activism and beyond, and to be aware of social diversities
and oppression” (2015b, 5). In the same year, Venir compiled a Queer Glossary (2015a) to
establish a common vocabulary for the Van Abbe and other institutions in the network.
The glossary contained definitions of words related to queering practices, such as homo-
nationalism and normativity. This glossary, which is accessible through the museum’s website,
is regularly updated to reflect the fluidity of gender identities, their definitions, and the
discourses around them, as well as to make it more genuinely inclusive and intersectional.
Using the terms as categories, Venir, together with designer Olle Lundin, prepared the
booklet, Queering the Collection Inventory, Inventory of Queer Aspects of the Art Collection
(2016), in order to investigate the status and potential of the existing collection (chapters 5
and 16 in this volume also consider the importance of inventories and categories). Colla-
borating with the curatorial department, Venir was able to discover gaps related to diversity
in prior inventories and to create additional entries. The queer inventory became a tool for
incorporating intersectionality and the ways in which identities shift according to their
temporal and spatial locations. A new entry describes work by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. It
defines Foucault’s concept of heterotopia before suggesting that Alptekin’s art constitutes a
“Self-Heterotopia”:

Bhari Alptekin gathered items from different sites and spaces. These fragments tell
about places and times in a new time and new place they belong to but at the same
time don’t. The Self that is then presented is a collection of fragments. It relies on
context and past to be understood. Isn’t it always the case for identity? Isn’t identity
always a fragmented whole we perform and make up in everyday life, that changes
from context to context, from time to time, from age to age?
(Venir and Lundin 2016)

The inventory engages with issues related to identity and inclusion, while open-ended
questions indicate the partial and subjective nature of any viewpoint.
 “A Museum Can Never Be Queer Enough” 281

Art, disidentification, and the role of failure

The notion of disidentification is relevant when we consider museums as sites for mental and
physical encounters as well as for negotiations and discussions about the construction of
identities, where dynamics of self and other play important roles. In Disidentifications: Queers of
Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), José Esteban Muñoz explains how marginalized
subjects are able to negotiate their identity in relation to the hegemony of normative cultural
representations. Disidentification resides between complete assimilation into, and the rejec-
tion of, the dominant cultural structure (11). It enables the marginalized subject not only to
resist this system but also to revise its narrative. Deviancy and failure can therefore be
explored in a process of “reworking … those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or
contradictory components of any identity” (12). In this context, the museum holds great
potential for interrupting the hegemony of damaging stories and histories because it is a space
where power dynamics related to bodies and space can be negotiated.
The negotiation between the self and other, or dominant and marginalized subjects, also
becomes visible when we investigate the role of bodies in the production of art. Jules Sturm,
an independent scholar in the Netherlands, led a seminar to help Van Abbe staff develop a
more inclusive mindset. In Bodies We Fail, Sturm reflects on bodies, their representation, and
their affective potential to disrupt the norm. Failure is essential to the process of disruption
because it is capable of “producing something new and other.” It creates a possibility “of an
eye capable of seeing something other than what is given to be seen and over which the self
does not hold absolute sway” (Kaja Silverman quoted in Sturm 2014, 22). Sturm follows
Kaja Silverman in her elaboration of D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” as an
alternative to perfection and a possible counter to the exclusions produced by binary thinking
of perfection and failure. In Bodies We Fail, Sturm defines “failed bodies” in their capacity to
fail to “fulfil certain corporeal standards” (23) and argues that their representation is “‘a
valuable source for re-educating the ways we picture our bodies and ourselves” (23). “The
body,” Sturm argues, “is at once a subject’s most intimate experience” while at the same time
it is the “most inescapable form of public constitution” (20). The disidentificatory process of
learning and unlearning to perceive bodies outside the norm can be fostered by looking at
artworks (18).
These ideas are exemplified in two works in the Van Abbemuseum collection by Berlin-based
art duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Toxic and Normal Work. In 2016, these were dis-
played opposite each other, one video playing at a time. The audience sat between them next to
a deserted stage, indicating that the show – the center of focus – was always already on the
margins. This decentering was in essence a strategy of disidentification, forcing viewers to
reconsider their positioning (literally and figuratively). Moreover, both videos incorporated
photographs, raising questions about authenticity and the generative power of reproduction.2
Boudry and Lorenz’s works “challenge the view that identity is a static entity that imposes
limitations on others” (Van Abbemuseum 2018a). The videos deal with performativity,
sexuality, gender, enactment, drag, history, and the reappropriation of identities. In Normal
Work, they restage the story of nineteenth-century maid Hannah Culliwick, who would have
been considered a “failed” body in her time. She was in a long sexual relationship with her
employer which included sadomasochism and gendered role play, but the restaging reclaims
her story. In Toxic, the artists explore the boundaries of the notion of toxicity, including the
harmful materials that produce film, as a “punk figure in glitter” and a drag queen – both of
282 Rensma et al.

ambiguous gender – discuss photography (Boudry and Lorenz 2012). The video incorporates
antique police photographs of homosexuals and criminals, questioning the role of authorities in
deciding who is deviant. The act of redefining toxicity is powerful and relies on processes of
disidentification. Boudry and Lorenz ask, “Might the discourse on toxicity, which installs
violent hierarchies, also be able to introduce new subjectivities and new queer bonds (between
people and people but also between people and objects, people and masks)?” (2012). In this
way, failure and deviance lead to new understandings of queerness.

Disruption and space

The artworks on display in the Van Abbemuseum are in a continuous, dynamic relationship with
the exhibit space. Interior space can house endless series of representations and layers of meaning,
and the idea of a space as an accumulation of previous events and experiences has been discursively
examined in works such as Béatriz Colomina’s Sexuality and Space (1992). In “Of Other Spaces:
Utopias and Heterotopias,” Michel Foucault describes how the museum functions as a heterotopia3
or nonnormative space (1986, 26). This process begins with an allusion to a 1917 work of art.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal in a museum.4 By depriving the
urinal of its practical use, signing it, and presenting it as a sculptural object, he declared it to
be art, and he titled it Fountain. At the Van Abbemuseum, an intervention by Tania Bruguera
during the exhibition Arte Útil consisted of a replica of this autographed urinal placed in the
public toilet, which had just been made gender inclusive. The intervention was well within
the scope of Arte Útil; by restoring the urinal to its original purpose, Bruguera invited the
visitor to consider the usefulness of art and its function within society (Van Abbemuseum
2013). The presence of the urinal in a gender-neutral space made many visitors uncomfor-
table. Visitors who initially thought that the urinal marked the space as male had to stop and
question this assumption, as well as others (for instance, whether men are the only users of
urinals). Through such encounters, the museum aimed to become a social power plant,
where ideas could be created, exchanged, and tested.
As this example suggests, examining art from a queer perspective can disrupt normative
dynamics. Sara Ahmed’s work on sexual orientation, direction, and repetition is also relevant
to the Van Abbemuseum’s efforts. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed explains that hetero-
sexuality functions as an invisible background (2006, 87). Normativity is shaped through the
endless repetition of an image; ultimately, “familiarity” ensnares us in a heteronormative
reality structured around binary constructions of sex and gender. Ahmed’s lens forces us to
rethink how museums police normativity and enforce codes of behavior by repeating them
until they are so familiar as to be unquestioned. At the Van Abbe, strategies of queering and
cripping resist such dynamics.
An event at the Van Abbemuseum in the summer of 2017, Becoming More, provokes
reflection on themes of repetition, accessibility, and normativity. At the event, theorist
Nancy Jouwe described Gloria Wekker’s work as influential to her understanding of the
“cultural archive” (2017), or set of inherited hegemonic beliefs. Wekker explained that
“the cultural archive is located in many things, in the way we think, do things and look
at the world, in what we find (sexually) attractive” (2016, 19). In this sense, the archive
is related to the repetitive heteronormativity described by Ahmed. As Jouwe mentioned
at the caucus opening, “The museum is not only a material space, it is also a discursive
place.” There can be no such thing as “l’art pour l’art” (2017), or art for art’s sake. By
 “A Museum Can Never Be Queer Enough” 283

exposing the power of assumptions and received ideas, Becoming More was intended as a
“caucus [inciting reflections on] … how art can provide a productive, critical space” for
dialogue and experiments with novel ways of thinking, so that old practices are disrupted
while new “solidarities [or alliances] are formed” (Van Abbemuseum 2017).

Cultural mediation and deviancy

The interventions described above contributed to an aura of inclusion. However, if a
museum aims to go beyond the abstraction and isolation of modern art, it must also
engage in radically creative acts of mediation and extend its reach beyond the building,
incorporating novel modes of thinking, different types of knowledge, and new perspec-
tives. Creative mediation strategies that deviate from standard practice are visible in
Qwearing the Collection, a two-part project directed by Lundin and Venir. Qwearing is a
contraction of the words queering and wearing, alluding to performative aspects of identity.
First, we printed five cotton jackets with images, information, and questions related to
works on display. These supplemented wall text and other materials.

FIGURE 23.1 Qwearing the Collection opening

Source: © Olle Lundin.
284 Rensma et al.

Second, we designed colorful ombré scarves (now for sale in our shop) with terminology
from the glossary. These provided visitors with pertinent vocabulary without sending them
scrambling for their mobile phones and other devices. Together, the scarves and garments
created a unified experience as visitors browsed the collection while wearing them. Accessing
information on clothing involved reading text and imagery from one’s own body as well as
surrounding bodies. This altered the exhibition space and renegotiated the relationship
between visitors who were wearing the explanatory items and those who were not, initiating
dialogue. The strategy worked well: while putting on fancy dress and being playful, visitors
were able to learn more about the artwork and to consider it from queer perspectives. This
creative form of mediation also led visitors to discuss how and where we gather information.
Qwearing the Collection thus reinforced Sturm’s assertion that art can be “the site where
corporeal or sensory perception is negotiated” (2014, 18). In this context, the notion of
corpoliteracy derived from Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proves useful.5 A strategy of
learning and unlearning, corpoliteracy is an exercise in reading “bodily knowledge,”
which recognizes the body’s “potential of memorizing and passing on/down acquired
knowledge through performativity” (Ndikung 2016, 3). Ndikung focuses on forms of
dance to illustrate how individual as well as groups of bodies can carry cultural markers,
identities, and knowledge, in addition to countering them. These notions were enacted
in Qwearing the Collection, as bodies wearing “cultural markers” linked to the collection
were prominent, and visitors were encouraged to engage in a kind of deviancy by
entering personal space and reading each other’s bodies.
As part of its mediation strategy, the Van Abbemuseum staff is also interested in
developing strong lines of communication with diverse constituency groups in order to
learn and create knowledge collaboratively. With the installation of a Werksalon (Work
Salon), which brings groups in for presentations, discussions, and other activities, the
museum has invested in a long-term dialogue with the queer community. The museum
has also organized events and workshops on queering topics ranging from fashion to
office spaces, from sports to family constellations. In the monthly Queer Book Club, the
discussion of one book led to conversations about ongoing societal tensions and struggles.
Such events also instigate discussions of artworks, for instance, on how they are pre-
sented, as well as on how queer individuals are treated and represented within the
museum space and by the staff. These community dialogues are integral to the reclama-
tion of the museum’s space; moreover, they contribute to the institution’s effort to
connect artistic practice and human rights activism.
One goal of the institution is to welcome all kinds of bodies through multiple
approaches to mediation. Project leader Marleen Hartjes (2018) explains that accessibility
is understood as an umbrella term, relevant to everyone: the institution must provide
multiple, intersecting approaches to the story it tells. The importance of intersectionality
is clearly illustrated in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, where
Robert McRuer asserts that “able-bodiedness … even more than heterosexuality, still
largely masquerades as a non-identity, as the natural order of things” (2006, 1). Alluding
to Adrienne Rich’s (1980) theorization of compulsory heterosexuality, McRuer argues
that there is a similar mechanism in “compulsory able-bodiedness.” To disrupt this
mechanism, the Van Abbemuseum employs a strategy of cripping and queering, for
example, through the creation of a Queer Sign Glossary, a version of the Queer Glossary in
sign language. In order to be able to provide tours to queer visitors with hearing loss, the
 “A Museum Can Never Be Queer Enough” 285

museum collects and documents examples of queer sign language in the Netherlands. By
extending its work beyond the space of the building in this way, the museum provides a
compendium of Dutch sign language expressions that are crucial when signing with, or
for, queer individuals with hearing loss. Outreach of this kind provides a broader public
service and increases understanding among social groups.

Conclusion
The Van Abbemuseum aims not to rely solely on events or exhibitions that feature
LGBTQ+-related topics, but to address deeper, structural questions about its own posi-
tion with regard to gender and sexuality. In this final section, we will therefore take a
closer look at the ways in with the museum challenges its own authority through
research and knowledge production. This objective is fulfilled through initiatives such as
Deviant Practice, a residency program for researchers and artists (Van Abbemuseum 2018b).
Recently, the museum collaborated with Venir and artist Julius Thissen in selecting three
artists-in-residence for a project titled Why Am I Here? Open Call for Trans and Intersex
Artists. This project provides material support and generates space for the stories of trans
people.6 As Venir says (2018), material support is a minimum condition for the emo-
tional labor involved in educating and providing information, especially in a time when
artists, especially those who are members of minority groups, are often expected to
represent themselves and their identities for minimal, if any, compensation. At the same
time, our residencies and research activities benefit the institution by providing oppor-
tunities to engage in critical self-reflection, examining questions such as why past interest
in marginalized communities has been mostly temporary, and what our institution can do
to make this interest more consistent and integral.
The road to a queer museum proves to be an interesting and challenging journey that
involves tasks not ordinarily considered part of a museum’s mission, like gathering stories
from intersex individuals or creating a queer sign language glossary. Could we ever
consider the queer museum project complete or queer enough? Certainly, the approaches
to Queering the Collection at the Van Abbemuseum instigate broader reflections on the
relevance and place of the museum in society. The project forces visitors and staff to
look at the museum in new ways, for example, as a space for negotiating issues con-
cerning emancipation and inclusion. For the Van Abbemuseum, it is important to keep
this dialogue open and lively, to keep negotiating the museum’s position, and to de- and
reconstruct our foundations radically. This approach to disrupting the normative dynam-
ics of museum spaces is enhanced by a multi-departmental commitment and collabora-
tions with community members. With its radical central focus on deviancy, the Van
Abbemuseum has created a space that welcomes diverse experiences of embodiment,
makes room for different stories, and revises existing social narratives. By defining the
center from the margins, the Van Abbe has the potential of becoming a social power
plant, one that generates new strategies for global human rights efforts.

Notes
1 For another discussion of IHLIA’s role, see chapter 10 in this book.
2 Chapter 14 discusses this topic as well.
286 Rensma et al.

3 To illustrate the affective and political potential of the exhibition space, we must consider Tony
Bennett’s assertion that the museum is a Foucauldian heterotopia. According to Bennett, modern
museums developed to be “vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting messages of power” (1988, 74).
In the museological realm, people are made complicit in the workings of power, rather than being
submissive to it. This has created a “society regulated through its self-observation” (82).
4 We acknowledge theories that Duchamp did not create this work (Paijmans 2018).
5 In 2016, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin participated in The Long Night of Ideas, where Soh Bejeng
Ndikung introduced the concept of corpoliteracy as “unlearning the given” and “deconstructing
ideologies” (2016; for an elaboration, see Ndikung 2018).
6 Jack Halberstam reflects on the construction of identity through embodiment in “Trans* – Gender
Transitivity and New Configurations of Body, History, Memory and Kinship.” Halberstam asserts that
“bodies often exceed the apparatuses … available to represent them,” rejecting the notion of an existing
“whole” necessarily constructed from different parts. Halberstam argues that the parts could be assembled
to “mean something different than [what] the logic of gender dictates” (2016, 370–371).

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1988. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4: 73–101.
Boudry, Pauline, and Renate Lorenz. 2012. Toxic. https://www.boudry-lorenz.de/toxic/.
Colomina, Béatriz, ed. 1997. Sexuality and Space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
Esche, Charles. 2014. Personal conversation with Daniel Neugebauer.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces,” edited and translated by J. Miskowiec. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27.
Halberstam, J. Jack. 2016. “Trans* – Gender Transitivity and New Configurations of Body, History,
Memory, and Kinship.” Parallax 22(3): 366–375.
Hartjes, Marleen. 2018. Personal conversation with Anne Rensma. April 17.
IHLIA. 2018. “Queering the Collections – Seksuele en Genderdiversiteit in Erfgoed.” https://www.
ihlia.nl/queering/.
Jouwe, Nancy. 2017. Comments at Becoming More event. May 18.
Kumbier, Alana. 2009. “Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive.” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.
Louvre-DNP. 2010. “The Concept of Mediation.” http://www.museumlab.eu/greeting/mediation.html.
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York
University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications, Queers of Color. and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. 2016. “Unlearning the Given. Exercises in Demodernity and
Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge. A Performative, Discursive and Corporeal Framework for
The Long Night of Ideas.” SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form/Ideas. https://savvy-con-
temporary.com/en/events/2016/unlearning-the-given/.
Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. 2018. “Corpoliteracy.” In aneducation, edited by Sepake Angiama,
Clare Butcher, Alkisti Efthymiou, Anton Kats, and Arnisa Zeqo, 107–115. Berlin: Archive Books.
Paijmans, Theo. 2018. “The Iconic Fountain (1917) Was Not Created by Duchamp.” See All This.
https://seeallthis.com/blog/the-iconic-fountain-1917-is-not-created-by-marcel-duchamp/.
Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5(4): 631–660.
Sturm, Jules. 2014. Bodies We Fail: Productive Embodiments of Imperfection. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Van Abbemuseum. 2013. “Programme: Museum of Arte Útil.” https://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/pro-
gramme/programme/museum-of-arte-util/.
Van Abbemuseum. 2016. “Here or There? Locating the Karel 1 Archive.” Michael Karabinos. https://
vanabbemuseum.nl/en/research/research-programme/deviant-practice-2016-17/michael-karabinos/.
Van Abbemuseum. 2017. “Programme: Becoming More.” https://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/programme/
programme/becoming-more/.
Van Abbemuseum. 2018a. “About.” Queering the collection. https://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/collection/
queering/about/.
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Van Abbemuseum. 2018b. “Research Grants 2018–2019.” Deviant Practice 2018–19. https://vanabbe-
museum.nl/en/research/research-programme/deviant-practice-2018-19/.
Venir, Alice. 2015a. A Queer Glossary. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.
Venir, Alice. 2015b. Queering the Collection at the Van Abbemuseum. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.
Venir, Alice. 2018. Personal conversation with Anne Rensma. March 16.
Venir, Alice, and Olle Lundin. 2016. Queering the Collection, Inventory of Queer Aspects of the Art
Collection. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.
Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
24
CONCLUSION
Joshua G. Adair

From the moment my co-editor and I started to consider creating this collection, one word
kept coming up over and over: unruliness. An early version of the title included the term; it
was incorporated for a time in several section titles. Unsurprisingly, however, the word
refused to stay put. Although we embrace – and are guided by – a strong sense of unruliness,
it did not seem quite right to pin it down and define its terms. To do so would have robbed
unruliness of its essential slipperiness. Pigeonholing it in that way also risked rendering it a
relic of the past or something figurative in the future – or perhaps something that never quite
established itself in any tense – a has-been, a sell-out, or a wannabe. So, in the end, we opted
not to categorize, quantify, or qualify the unruliness that characterizes each of the chapters in
this collection.
We hope not to have instigated a new set of rigid rules or to have reified the latest
instantiation of ironclad instruction about how best for museums to embrace gender and
sexuality in all their myriad forms and iterations. Instead, to be more precise – and less
pinned down – we worked to offer insight, while suggesting certain sensibilities and
sensitivities that may enhance thinking and practice without ever reaching a state of stasis
or absolute certainty. To embrace unruliness is to resist rest and contemplate ways to
reprove, improve, and keep on the move. It is not about breaking rules but about
refusing them; in that sense it also rejects reductive binaries and other such banal boxes.
Unruliness, after all, knows no rules.

Interrupting
Many of the contributors in this collection make a simple, powerful point: museums improve – not
just change for novelty’s sake – when their narratives and practices of performing culture are
interrupted. For too long, information, ideas, and interpretation have all come in the form of
a monologue rather than a dialogue. Because the former is so ingrained in our educational
systems – whatever the venue – we often forget that we possess the power to disrupt the
stories we are sold. This is especially true when we are not even in the room. Insisting
upon space within this situation is the first step toward more substantial change.
 Conclusion 289

In many, many cases – pun intended – the material is already there. The simple – though
certainly not uncomplicated – act of (re)discovering, relabeling, recategorizing, and/or
juxtaposing pieces creates new conversations. Vitrines, murals, installations, and artist-made
objects – all features of traditional museums – become revolutionary and resistant when
created, arranged, positioned, and curated by those with minority perspectives in mind.
Quotidian objects – even those as unlikely as teapots or underwear – proclaim the productive
potential of pushing boundaries.
In their Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums, Franklin D. Vagnone and Deborah E.
Ryan propose a hypothesis about historic house museums (HHMs) which applies more
widely: “HHMs fail, at least in part, by their inability to draw connections between the real-
life, quirky, and emotional experiences from the House’s past and the same sorts of feelings in
the visitors’ own homes. We call the possibility of this shared experience ‘poetic preserva-
tion’” (2016, 35). Indeed, their manifesto presents a call to action for all museums that insists
upon multilevel engagement, not the least of which is that visitors feel “at home” – or at
least experience a sense of being recognized – in a profound way.
This sense of being “at home” – in a place where one can speak one’s mind freely and emote
as necessary – becomes radical when applied to museums, which have so long been identified
with temples and palaces. For many minorities – especially where gender and sexuality are con-
cerned, let alone where those identities intersect with other categories – museums have always
been the antithesis of home. In fact, they have operated as distorting mirrors that, upon inspec-
tion, fail to reflect certain significant qualities and characteristics. By interrupting, demanding
hospitality in the form of recognition and representation, these individuals begin to build places
that they might inhabit – if only temporarily and perhaps still somewhat uneasily.
Vagnone and Ryan continue:

From our relationship with International Council of Museums (ICOM), we learned of the
Gaasbeek Castle in Flanders. The Gaasbeek has been redefined as a Heritage Laboratory under
the motto: “Whatever is permitted will not teach/learn us anything; the first commandment
therefore is to disobey.” For the last ten years, the historic site has been experimenting by
bringing in contemporary art and scattering it throughout the castle’s rooms, corridors, and
staircases. They have strategically re-interpreted the site to make guests question the rele-
vance of the place, and to confront the public with many different questions without giving
answers, thus drawing them out of their comfort zone.
(2016, 36)

In this formulation, being “at home” is not synonymous with constant comfort – it is
important to remember that home is often a site of serious conflict and grave suffering.
Indeed, many readers – and authors in this collection – will take issue with my using the
concept of home as a way to frame improving museum practice at all. I recognize and
appreciate that for many people home represents a site of oppression, conflict, and profound
disappointment. In many regards, museums do as well. The familiarity of those formidable
circumstances, however, offers unique insight – insight of a variety that has the potential to
transform museum practice. In addition, and this may be overly optimistic on my part, I
hope that home is not only a place in the past – a site of frequent pain – but also a place in
which all of us are currently ensconced in some form as we fashion our own sites of dwelling
and (self-) determination, even if it is just within ourselves.
290 Joshua G. Adair

Ideally, home is a site where we have a say – and a stake – a place where we can interrupt,
even scream if we want. The rules that might typically or traditionally apply work differently
within those walls, and they are able to take on a form – and freedom – similar to the sensibility
that characterizes the Gaasbeek. I advocate here not for anarchy, but for an unruliness that
manages to operate somehow in a space where acting out is encouraged and all voices are ulti-
mately heard. All homes, at some point or another, are unpleasant places to be, but unpleasant
and unwelcoming are nowhere near the same. In these spaces – these museums cum homes – we
must be able to interrupt and acknowledge, gratefully, that father does not, in fact, always know
best. People who identify as queer should not be required to perform conventional sex and
gender roles; nor should they have to perform their identities to be gawked at on display.

Relocating
Sometimes making museums matter means leaving one institution behind – sometimes for-
ever or at least for a very long time – and finding another. In the case of historic house
museums, for example, some truths will never be told due to conservatism and the cash that
controls who can speak and who cannot. At other times relocation means taking a respite in
a pop-up museum or temporary exhibition. Museum exhibitions and/or displays, however
short-term or small-scale, can reinvigorate and offer new opportunities to innovate and to
improve – even to identify. At other times, as our contributors attest, it helps to invite an
expert or knowledgeable community members in to spruce up the story.
A recent article by Alex Marshall in The New York Times entitled “Penguin Sex and Stolen
Artifacts: Museum Tours Through a New Lens,” examines how relocating focus reenergizes
museums. Examining new tours in British museums, Marshall highlights the possibilities for
new paradigms of practice that appear when museums ask interpreters to offer innovative,
critically informed perspectives. As a result, materials that previously went unnoticed – or
were purposely hidden – have come to light, like George Murray Levick’s “semi-secret 1915
paper ‘The Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin’” (Marshall 2019).
Specialized tours, which fill quickly, form “part of a growing movement at British museums to
show collections through a new lens, and to share largely untold stories hidden among their
pieces” (Marshall 2019). This relocation of focus, popular as it may be, also creates controversy, as
Alex Marshall indicates: “Not everyone is pleased. The British Museum began a monthly series
last year to discuss the acquisition of items in its collection, partly in response to Ms Procter [who
has designed and led these tours]. (The next is scheduled for February 8.) In April, the British
tabloid The Daily Mail wrote that Ms Procter was ‘using sell-out tours to label Lord Nelson a
‘white supremacist’ and brand Queen Victoria a ‘thief.” She immediately began receiving
threats” (2019). In response, Ms Proctor observes, “if I’m touching a nerve, it means that it’s
relevant and important” (2019). Such tours illustrate the necessity of refusing to avert our gaze, of
focusing intently and directly, if we are to find/create institutions in which we feel welcome and
able to learn – and to locate (or imagine) ourselves in the narrative being presented.
This kind of systemic, in-depth change does not happen easily, as the authors in this col-
lection clearly attest. Not only are substantial attitudinal alterations necessary – we have to
want to change and be willing to work hard to do so – there are also serious material con-
siderations with which to reckon. As Amy Levin highlights in the introduction – which I
believe bears frequent repeating – producing serious critical and creative scholarship, like the
essays in this collection, earns little-to-no remuneration for anyone involved. In fact, some
 Conclusion 291

significant – even essential – voices are not represented here and elsewhere because of the
longstanding, if inequitable, tradition of asking scholarly and creative experts to contribute
their labors gratis. For many individuals today, regardless of their institutional affiliations or
employment statuses, that tradition is not only untenable, it is completely unfair. Ultimately,
we believe, this must change.
In addition, museums must commit to greater representation and equality in something
more than their mission statements. Material resources must be committed – and on a large
scale – so that such relocations of thought and perspective actually become possible. One
common thread in many of the chapters in this collection is the informal, nebulous, and
temporary nature of much of the groundbreaking – and in our view, essential – work taking
place in regard to gender and sexuality in museums. Support exists, but most frequently on
an interpersonal level and in a manner that proves difficult to locate – in other words,
innovation rarely enjoys a permanent home and structural resources. This, for numerous
reasons – not the least of which is the way these initiatives tend to be tied to specific figures
who may move on to new positions – is highly problematic. When we locate some place of
permanence, there is a greater chance of lasting change.
In this regard, at least in the USA, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. A recent report
in The New York Times announced that the American Alliance of Museums intends to commit
four million dollars to the Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion project
(Aridi 2019). One assumes the logic at work here centers upon the notion that diverse boards
foster hiring diverse staff who in turn present fuller pictures and more inclusive narratives. There
is clearly a need for major change in this regard considering that “A recent survey by the alliance
found that nearly half of all museum boards in the United States are all white, despite the fact that
the majority of museum directors believe diverse and inclusive institutions connect better with
the general public and can develop creative solutions to new problems” (2019).
Having taken the instruction of our contributors seriously, however, it is difficult not to
remain at least somewhat skeptical that such a top-down approach will nurture the kinds of
grassroots initiatives that effectively engage and represent diverse constituencies.

Returning
While it is fashionable – or at least common – to assert that you cannot go home again, I
conclude this collection by advising that you do just that. Visitors must at least try to be at
home – and demand to be welcomed – in museums for them to work their magic. This sug-
gestion to revisit is practical: you have no idea what is going on there unless you return and
report back. Ten years ago I wrote my first book chapter, which appeared in Gender, Sexuality
and Museums, about the fact that gay/queer men were not being represented honestly or
authentically in the houses they so carefully created. When these homes became museums,
they were maintained to represent those men and their tastes – but not their sexuality. When I
visited their homes, I felt at home on some, if not every, level. At a historical site like Pendarvis,
the focus of that study, I felt a deep kinship with Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, their style,
stubbornness, and sexuality. And yet, as a paying visitor, I had to piece their story together
myself since no one was willing to share it. That too felt like a part of my past home life –
before I was out – but not in a comfortable way. Often the reminders of home also serve as
spurs to agitate for change – for greater transparency and honesty – because they are familiar, if
unwelcome, features of a life we worked to transform for ourselves.
292 Joshua G. Adair

I have had similar experiences with dishonesty, silence, and willful forgetting countless
times when I have visited such historic sites. One in particular, the Mercer-Williams House
in Savannah, Georgia, has drawn me to return multiple times in hopes that the official nar-
rative delivered there will finally address the truth about the gay former owner, Jim Williams,
and the young lover he shot to death in the front room (fictionalized in Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil). The last time I returned, in March of 2017, our tour guide defiantly
proclaimed that academics had written about how the tours of the mid-nineteenth-century
house did not tell the truth. I held my breath and chuckled to myself since I was, indeed, one
of those academics. “That’s not true though,” he beamed, “we’re happy to talk about
Danny’s murder” and then pointed to an alleged bullet hole from the incident.
I had not called for more transparency about murder, specifically – though I suppose that
enhancement is its own kind of success. No, I asked why no one could talk honestly about
the nature of the two men’s relationship, especially since it was so vividly chronicled in John
Berendt’s novel as well as on the silver screen.
Although I have started this section with two institutions that have not successfully chan-
ged their ways, returning to others has revealed genuine progress in the arena of honest
representation. Several museums have rendered my early historic house museum research
obsolete, because they have come out of the closet. Although the list is still somewhat short,
a handful of historic houses in the USA and Europe have incorporated frank discussions
about previous owners’ or inhabitants’ sexuality into the narratives visitors encounter. Among
those in the USA are the Alice Austen House, the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley
(which includes Glen Burnie House), and Beauport (the Sleeper-McCann House). I hope
this list will continue to grow in coming years. Had I not returned to these sites – given them
another chance – I might never have learned facts that so long lay fallow.
Along the way, of course, I did a fair amount of my own agitating, interrogating,
interrupting, and asking for honesty. My interventions – like many of those described in
this volume – were not always met with positive responses or consequent changes. Some
actions, in fact, drew at worst anger and at best silence. But change has and will likely
continue to come, especially if we consider and commit to the kind of action our con-
tributors call for. For those of us who love museums – especially the museums we imagine
that they could someday eventually be – walking away in disgust, no matter how tempting
or appropriate it might be, simply is not an option.
We must instead take heed of the many possibilities presented in this volume – and the
other excellent ones out there – and apply them in our own spheres of influence. We must
open ourselves to others’ voices, experiences, and realities because the very nature of this
work demands plural perspectives. We must remain unruly, resistant – as the Gaasbeek
reminds us – and trust in the productive potential of charting an unpopular, or as yet unpo-
pulated path. In the end, as our authors have illustrated, activism is the engine that animates
change – especially in the arena of gender, sexuality, and museums.

References
Aridi, Sara. 2019. “American Alliance of Museums Leads Diversity Initiative.” The New York Times, January
16. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/arts/design/museums-national-diversityinitiative.html?rref=
collection%2Ftimestopic%2FMuseums&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&m
odule=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection.
 Conclusion 293

Marshall, Alex. 2019. “Penguin Sex and Stolen Artifacts: Museum Tours Through a New Lens.” The New
York Times, January 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/uk-alternativemuseumtours.html?
rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FMuseums&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=strea
m&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection.
Vagnone, Franklin D., and Deborah E. Ryan. 2016. Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures.
AAM. See American Alliance of Museums
abortion 12, 207, 210–211
Abortion Never group 212
Abyss (musical composition) 71
ACK. See Amar Chitra Katha
activism 2, 17, 24, 35, 40, 62, 64, 113, 115, 119,
145, 188, 190, 228
actor-network theory 198
Adair, Joshua G. 129, 254
Adolescent Education Program 105
Adventures of the White Beryl (artwork) 163
AEP. See Adolescent Education Program
Aeschylus 170–171
aesthetics: center 158; hierarchical theories of 145
African Rainbow Family 64
Afrofuturist cultural productions 165n10
AGT. See Art Gallery of Toronto
AIDS, activists, transformative role of 114–115;
awareness posters 59; Buddy program 118;
fund (AIDSfonds) 117; memorial quilt 119,
121; people with 118. See also HIV/AIDS
A Lasting Impression (tour) 244
Alba, Alicia Gaspar de 21
Alexander, Tamera 240; belief 243; Christian
morality 243; (con)textual study 244–250;
delivering false narratives 243; forging bond
with community 244; readers encountering
244; romance novels 242–243; sales pitch 244;
success 243; use of term “real characters” 244;
website 243
ALGA. See Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
Alice Austen House (New York) 6
“Alt. Portraits” 74
Amar Chitra Katha (comic book) 158–159
American Alliance of Museums 10, 12, 31, 291;
codes of ethics 31; focus on outward-facing
activities 37n1; LGBTQ Alliance 12, 37n2
American Psychiatric Association 255
American Writers Museum (Chicago) 11
amnesia 158–159, 163–165; collective 92;
protagonist 159; public 92
Amsterdam City Archive 116
Amsterdam City Council 116, 121
Amsterdam History Museum. See Amsterdam
Museum
Amsterdam Museum 6, 12, 116, 119–121, 254,
265, 268, 269, 270–271, 273, 275;
administration 269; collaboration with
transgender communities 265; invitation to
prominent politicians 181
Amsterdam Pride 274
Amsterdam TransPride 272–273, 276n3
Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums 289
“An Armchair Tour of the ‘Queer People’s Knick
Knack Emporium’” 64
anger 104–105, 210, 265
Ankara Women From Past to Present (exhibition) 96
Antarang sex museum 16, 101; attempts to revive
110; clientele catered to 102; closure of
110–111; coffin exhibit 105; as contact zone
106–108; curator 102; exhibits at MDACS
101, 103–104; as contact zone 102; goals of
102, 103; HIV/AIDS awareness promotion
104–106; inauguration of 102; location
102–103; premature closure 102; shifts in
pedagogical impetus of 103; visitors’ log
108–110
Antinous 61
 Index 295

antiretroviral drugs 119, 123n13 art museums 22–23, 69–70, 146, 159, 187–188,
Anzaldúa, Gloria 3, 22–25 194. See also individual museums
April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady Art of Protest workshop 227
(exhibition) 266 artworks 22–24, 23, 26–28, 49, 133–134, 147,
aqausiit 149 151, 157, 161, 175–176, 192, 199, 210,
“archive fever” 101 234–235, 254, 268, 279, 281–282, 284;
archives 32, 66, 71–72, 82, 101, 114–116, 133, exhibitions, and museums 26; viewer of 24
141–142, 148, 160, 167–171, 176, 189–190, Ashley, April 265
200, 222–223, 232, 234, 268, 279–280, 282; Ashton, Jenna 6
cultural 282; digital cultural heritage 198; As We Have Always Done (book) 152
grassroots transgender 170; local 117; mined A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints
268; repressed 70 (exhibition) 52
Arctic Hysteria (exhibition) 148 audiences 9, 24, 40, 47, 58, 84, 240, 278;
ardhanaarishwara 111n4. See Shiva geographical spread of 62
Ariadne. See Arianna. Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives 86
Arianna 167–169, 171–172, 174–176; and “authorized museum ethics discourse” 31
Dionysus 174; framing choices 175; Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (novel) 231,
photograph 171–173 233, 236
Arke, Pia 148 autonomy 128, 160, 210, 248
art 6, 8, 21–27, 40, 47, 60, 64, 69, 106, 113, Aztec: The World of Moctezuma (exhibition) 24–25
136–138, 140, 145–146, 161, 163, 172,
175–176, 182, 188, 191, 204, 211, 231–232, BACA. See La Biennale d’Art Contemporain
234, 255–256, 267, 279–284; contemporary Autochtone
159, 191–192, 257, 289; erotic 40; explicit 47, Bakker, Alex 268
50; fictitious 175; folk 120, 211; invoked Baldwin, Martin 187–194
23–24, 26; perception of 23; from queer BAME (British and Minority Ethnic) artists 63
perspective 282 banners 86, 209–211, 225
Arte Útil (exhibition) 282 Barlow, Clare 10
art galleries 69, 113, 134, 140, 187, 192. See also Barnard and Sons objects 72
galleries Başaran, Tunç 96–97
Art Gallery of Ontario 189; archives 190; Batuman, Bülent 93, 96
Volunteer Committee 194; women’s Beardsley, Aubrey 59
committees 17, 189–190, 194. See also Art beaver 135
Gallery of Toronto Becoming More (event) 282–283
Art Gallery of Toronto: Evaluation Committee Being Human festival 64
195n5; Exhibition Committee 191; exhibitions Belcourt, Billy-Ray 147
of objects 192; male members of 189; Belle Meade Plantation 243
volunteer woman’s experience at 188; Bennett, Tony 39
women’s committees 187–189, 190–194, Berendt, John 240
194n4. See also Art Gallery of Ontario Bibliothèque Nationale 46
artifacts 17, 22–23, 104, 120–121, 133, 137, 146, Bieber, Justin 257
170, 200, 208; anthropological 22; archival binary gender expressions, and trans people 266
135, 141; cultural 21, 197, 204; digital museum Bird, Bird la 62, 64
197–198; Irish women’s history records 208 Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, The
artistic research 167, 172, 175–176 (book) 39
artists 6, 8, 10–12, 15, 21, 23–28, 40, 45, 57, bisexuality 10, 13, 74, 221, 256, 262
59–60, 62–64, 66, 69–70, 74, 90, 93, 106, 133, black and minority ethnic artists. See BAME artists
137, 145–148, 151, 160–161, 190, 192, 201, Black Cracker 63
209, 224, 231–233, 235, 253, 255–258, 261, black portrait busts 71
267, 281; and audience, performative BM. See British Museum
relationship between 24; avant-garde 231; BMC. See Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation
Chicana and Latina 27–28; contemporary 63, Bodies We Fail (book) 281
204, 209, 253; curation 133–143; lesbian 40; Boggs, Jean Sutherland 193
male 233; minority 15; nonbinary 7, 64, 66, Bonheur, Rosa 60
224, 257; nondominant 263; photographic 17; Boran, Behice 98n2
sexuality 10–11 border arte 24, 25
Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth 202 borderlands 22, 24–25, 27–29
296 Index
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (book)
23, 24, 25–26
Boudry, Pauline 281
Bourdieu, Pierre 34, 106
Bourgeois, Louise 157, 159
Bowery, Leigh 73
Boy & the Twins, The (artwork) 259
Breton, André 66
Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation 102
Britain 47, 75, 207, 224
British Ceramics Biennial 70
British Museum 6, 16, 45–47, 49–55, 170, 290;
collecting shunga at 46–47, 53n2, 53n3, 53n4;
collection 45; fourth century BCE Phigaleian
Frieze on display at 170; “gender identity” 170;
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (exhibition)
53n3; Passionate Art of Utamaro, The
(exhibition) 54n6; special exhibition
program 45
Brogan, Catherine 62
Bruguera, Tania 282
Bubble (artwork) 257
Cahun, Claude 172, 266, 267
Cameron, Julia Margaret 73
campness, of museum figurine holdings 75
Canatan, Ayten 96
Capitoline Museums 129, 171, 175
CARA exhibition. See Chicano Art: Resistance and
Affirmation (exhibition)
Carnton Plantation 240
Carrington, Dora 11
Casey, Valerie 92
catalogues 6, 8–10, 17, 27–28, 49–50, 52, 59, 76,
170, 183, 231, 232, 235–236, 279
cataloguing system 59–60, 175; LGBTQ+
histories included into 59; prior to 2015 59
Cather, Willa 11
censorship 32–33, 47, 84–85; explicit 32–33;
implicit 32–33, 34ceramics 72, 75–76
Ceylon (exhibition) 8–9
Chakravarti, Paromita 105
charcoal drawings 94, 99n4
Chicana art 21, 27
Chicana artists 27–28
Chicana feminism 21–23, 25, 27–29; focus on
gender, race, and power 21; frameworks for
museum 21; performative practice 22, 26, 29
Chicana feminist museology 2, 15, 22, 26, 28, 29;
applications 29; Aztec exhibit 24–25; border
arte 25; borderland practices 23, 27;
characteristics of 22; decolonizing initiative of
26; hierarchies of power 26, 29; Indigenous
objects 25; intervention of 26; knowledge and
identity formation 24, 25; liminal position of
museum visitors 23, 25, 28; methodology for
26; modernity 25–26; network of actors and
practices 23–24, 26, 29; perception of art 23;
positionality and reflexivity and 29; white
patriarchal culture 22, 26
Chicana identities 27
Chicanas 21–23, 25, 27–30
Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation
(exhibition) 21
Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House:
Cultural Politics and the CARA (exhibition) 21
Chicanx culture 26
children: Ankara ghetto, sexual harassment of 97;
depiction in shunga 49
Christian book awards 243
Christianity 142, 147, 243
Christian morality 243
Christian romance novels 239, 240, 243
Christmas at Carnton (novel) 239
Çiçekoǧlu, Feride 97, 98n2
cisgender 6, 14, 92, 95–96, 146, 259, 261, 275
cis-queer community 255
Civil War, US 241
Clark, Sonya 15
Clark, Timothy 45
Clarke, Kathleen 208
Clarke, Stephen 268
Clayton, Zorian 73
Clifford, James 108
clothing, accessing information on 12–13
CMS. See collections management system
Coffs Harbor Museum 84
Cole, Henry 67
collaboration 69, 84, 187, 213, 265, 268–269,
272–273, 279; commitment to 274;
community-museum 15; nonhierarchical
32–33
collecting 17, 115–116, 120, 175–176, 176–177,
201, 207–209, 211, 275; shunga, at British
Museum 46–47
collections 2, 5–7, 10, 15, 23, 31, 39–41, 45–47,
49, 57–60, 59, 62–66, 69–70, 74–76, 82,
113–114, 116, 118–119, 121, 127, 133,
135–136, 141–142, 157–158, 160, 167–169,
170, 175, 188–189, 193, 199, 200–201,
208–209, 211, 221, 227, 232–234, 253–254,
268, 275, 280; AIDS objects 120–121; auditing
76; hidden, reasons of 127; historical gaps in
76; interconnections in 167; museums 62, 70,
72–75, 85, 119, 227, 272; nonbinary identities
in, see nonbinary identities; permanent 12, 69,
73, 157–159, 161–163, 273–274; private 46;
temporary 12, see also pop-up museums
collections management systems: LGBTQ+
aspects of objects see LGBTQ+ aspects of
objects; user-friendly and streamlined 60
collective forgetting, by prison museums
91–92
Colomina, Béatriz 282

colonialism 8–9, 16, 128, 138–139, 145, 147,
151–153, 279
“Common Queer Nigger Bitch” banner 225
community: collaborations 220, 265, 269;
engagement 31, 254, 265, 275; exhibitions
147, 224–225, 274; involvement 268; members
12, 25, 40, 83, 204, 224, 265, 267–269, 272,
274–275; and museums 272–273; organizations
86, 188, 226–227; production 83
community-curated exhibitions 222–224, 223
Community Curators 222–223, 227–228
community-oriented programming 84
Company of Men, The (book) 257
Confederacy (Confederate States of America)
241–242, 245, 247
Conlan, Anna 233
connectivity 170
consultation 146, 193, 220–221, 226
Continuum: Framing Trans Lives in 21st Century
Britain (exhibition) 224
Cool Japan (exhibition) 9, 10, 16, 54n20
Coombes, Annie E. 21
Coulthard, Glen 146
Coutinho, Roel 114
crime 92, 94, 225, 255; institutionalization of 92
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and
Disability (book) 284
cross-dressers 14, 265–266, 271
cross-dressing 59, 135, 169, 171
Cruising Utopia (book) 157
cultural attitudes 28, 198
cultural identity 24–25, 27
cultural institutions 40, 57, 66, 83, 199, 213
cultural mediation 283–285
cultural production 21–22, 24, 26, 28, 135, 158
cultural professionals 115–116. See also museum
professionals
culture 13–14, 16, 21–24, 26, 28, 46, 48,
105–106, 139, 146, 160, 182, 197, 199, 221,
248, 258, 266; and biology 106
culture wars 31
curation 140, 197–198, 236; electronic 197–199;
heteronormative 7
curatorial bias 214
curatorial practices 2, 6, 16, 21, 39, 134, 231
curators 6, 10, 12–13, 15, 24, 27–28, 40, 46, 72,
82, 84–86, 92, 101–102, 110, 117, 127, 133,
141, 146, 151, 188, 190–194, 197–198, 200,
203–204, 208–209, 222, 224–225, 227–228,
231, 234, 236, 256, 265, 267, 274, 279;
Denver Community Museum 82; male 24
Danner, Sven 114
Darlinghurst Business Partnership 86
Davidmann, Sara 268
Davis, Ken 86
DCM. See Denver Community Museum
Index 297
decoloniality: and queerness 16; museum practices
128; potential of speculative imagination 164n4
decolonization 13, 24, 158, 266, 278
decontextualization, strategies of 95–97
DelCarlo, Michelle 82
Denver Community Museum 82
Denver Natural History Museum 25
D’Eon, Chevalier 59
Derrida, Jacques 101
Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories
52, 54n16, 54n19
deviance 13, 278, 279–285; commitment to
278–279; and failure 281; outcome of self-
reflection 278; (re)generative potential of 280
Deviant Practice (residency program) 13, 285
Dias, Yvo Manuel Vas 276n3
Digitaisering av kulturarv – en kort historie (article
section) 198
digital humanities 197, 199
digital museums: artifacts 197; Big Patchwork,
The 200–201; coastal women in Norway
201–203; digital objects 198–200; experts’
willingness to participate in 204–205; mission
statement 199; search fragment 202; women’s
story and Oslo 203–204
Digital Museum (Digitalt Museum) of Norway
17, 199, 202, 204
digital objects 199–201
digital scrapbooks 121
digital stories 201–204
digitized corpus, of museum objects 197
Dinner Party, The (artwork) 128, 161
Dionysus 129, 167, 169–171, 174–176; and
Arianna 174; photograph 171; theater 173
diorama 134, 135
disidentification, and failure 279, 281–282
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance
of Politics (book) 281
Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge, The
(book) 7
disruption, and space 282–283
diversity: ethnic 15, 269, 271; intersex 83;
racial 267
Dolhuys Museum (Haarlem) 268
domesticana 21
“Don’t Die of Ignorance” campaign 115
Drag Queen Deck (playing cards) 54n16
dualisms 168–169, 173
Duchamp, Marcel 282
Dugas, Gaëtan 118
Duncan, Carol 39
Dutch AIDS/HIV epidemic 113–114, 118, 121
Dutch museums, neglect of LGBTQ+ histories in
113, 115, 118–119
Dutch Open Air Museum 120
Duvar (The Wall) (film) 96–97
Duyvendak, Jan Willem 115
298 Index
“Éagfaidh Leanaí Vótáil in Aghaidh” posters 212
Edgy: The 16th LGBTQ+ History and Archives
Conference 67n3
education 24, 82, 104–105, 107–108, 110,
119, 141, 187, 190–191, 193, 199, 204,
222, 257, 279
Eighth Amendment (Ireland) 207
Eindhoven 254, 274, 278
Eisei Bunko Museum 52
embodiment 13, 23, 147–148, 161, 169, 257
emotional habitus 104
emotions 70, 73, 105, 147, 247
Enlightenment 127
Entering the Landscape (exhibition) 145,
149–151, 152
Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (book) 279
e-research 197
erotica 6
Esche, Charles 278
ethics: codes of practice 31, 33–34; of sexual
display 31. See also new museum ethics
ethnic diversity 269
ethnicity 8, 21, 23, 199, 279
ethos 36, 109, 221
European colonialism 148, 149
Eurovision Song Contest 75
Evangelical Christian Publishers Association 243
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display (book) 39
exhibitions 6, 7, 23, 113, 127; dynamic 271–272;
evoking gender stereotypes 9; focused on
transgender 266–267; at IHLIA 116; lasting
effects 273–275; as performative relationship
24; planning 273; practices 21, 26; versions of
270–271. See also individual exhibitions
Exhibition Rd LGBTQ+ Network 66
exhibitions 5–9, 11–13, 16–17, 22–24, 26–28, 32,
40, 45–54, 66, 69, 81–82, 84–87, 103, 109,
113–114, 116–118, 128, 133–134, 137,
139–145, 148–152, 161, 182, 188, 199, 211,
219, 222–228, 231–236, 253–254, 263,
265–276, 279, 290; design 22, 26, 28, 116. See
also individual entries
exhibition space 13, 52, 147, 226, 236, 284
Fabijanska, Monika 17
Facebook 211
Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity
& Inclusion project 291
Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia 26, 27
fantasy 137, 141, 239–240, 242–243, 246
female bodies and objects, roles of 17
Female Figure Lying on Her Back (artwork) 11
female museum volunteers 182, 188
female political prisoners: death from hunger
strikes 92; experiences in Ulucanlar Prison 90,
95, 97, 98n2; physical evidence of 99n4
female sexual play 256
feminine 157, 160, 162, 193, 256, 259
feminine men 256
feminism 6, 12, 14, 28, 182
Feminism and Museums (book) 6
feminists 5, 14, 23, 26, 90, 157, 161, 182, 231
feminist theory 14
Ferentinos, Susan 6
figurines 75
Fire in My Belly (artwork) 84–85
“First Wives Club: Salish Style” (article) 147
FLUID series (artwork) 258
“Following in the Footsteps of Vernon Lee”
(event) 64
forgetting 159
Foucault, Michel 282
Four Americans (exhibition) 233
Four Doors (photography studio) 73
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
(Washington, DC) 12
Frew, Elspeth 91
Friday Lates, LGBTQ+-themed 63–64
Frost, Stuart 40
F-type prisons 99n3
funding 11, 13, 16, 32, 58, 64, 84–85, 116, 280
Gaasbeek 289
galleries 5–6, 9, 15, 24–25, 28, 32, 45, 49, 52,
61–62, 66, 69, 74, 82, 84–85, 96, 101, 103,
117, 127, 140, 145, 149, 151, 161, 187–194,
224, 253, 262, 270–271, 274; queer label audit
of 61; at V&A 16
Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow) 6
Ganesh, Chitra, artistic practice of 16; digital
animations 163; ephemera 163–164;
examination of 128; Eyes of Time (artwork)
158–162; Scorpion Gesture, The (artwork)157,
162–163; storytelling tradition 157; Tales of
Amnesia (artwork)158–159
gays 10, 12–14, 40, 65, 70, 73–74, 76, 94,
114–115, 117, 138, 221, 226–227, 234,
255–257, 261–262; activists 115; cisgender
males 256; hypermasculine 257; men 114, 117;
white cisgender males 256
gay bathhouses 114
Gay Dating Show, The (TV series) 119
gay-lesbian-bisexual theory 15
gay marriage, legalization of 115, 122n6
gay movements 115
gay rights organizations 114
Geen Paniek! [Don’t Panic!] AIDS in Nederland
1982–2004 (book) 114
gender 6; ambiguity 17, 128, 171, 253, 256, 259,
266; binary notion of 9, 52, 260, 266;
difference, in photographic portraiture 9;
diversity 12, 45, 275; expression 171, 234, 266;
identity 2, 64–66, 94, 96, 134, 227, 255–256,
 Index 299

266, 280; inequalities 91, 188, 190; politics 10; Heritage Lottery Fund 221
preconceptions about 16–17; in prison 92; Herstory Gallery 160–161
roles 182–183, 233, 248, 290; scholarly heteronormative content, warning signs for 33–34
discourse about 5–7; social construction 15; heteronormativity 14–15, 31, 33, 35, 83, 139,
stereotypes 9, 105, 208; variability 138, 141 240, 282; definition 37n4
gender activism: innovative models for 17; hetero-patriarchy 158
resistance 182 heterosexuality 11, 15, 37n4, 76, 232, 284;
gendered memory, in Ulucanlar Prison 90, 93, monogamy 104; sex 117
94, 96–97. See forgetting heterosexuals 11, 59, 65, 69, 76, 263
genderfluid individuals 176, 255 heterotopia 280, 282
gender fluidity 253–256, 258, 259, 260 HHMs. See historic house museums
Geneeskundige en Gezondheidsdienst (Medical and Hicks, Robert 240–241
Public Health Service of Amsterdam) 116, 117 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American
General, Melissa 150 Portraiture (exhibition) 6, 85, 265, 274
Georgeson-Usher, Camille 128, 145–146, hijab 271
148, 150 hijra. See transgender
Gerstle, Andrew 45 Hill, Kate 5, 188
Gezmis, Deniz 98n2 historic house museums 70, 289, 290; and
GGD. See Geneeskundige en Gezondheidsdienst fiction 240
Gifford-Donnelly, Nellie 208 History of the Biomedicine Research Group 118
Gifford-Plunkett, Grace 208 HIV/AIDS 16, 101, 103–105, 107–121; activism
Gilbert, Jack 69 in USA 104–105; crisis 101, 103, 106, 123;
Giordano, Silvia 82 difficulty in prevention of 110; education/
girls, degrading images of 9–10 awareness 105–108; emergence in Netherlands
Giunta, Andrea 26, 27 113–115, 117, 122; epidemic 113–114,
Godsoe, Margaret 191 117–119, 121; in India 105; in Netherlands,
Goldin, Nan 54n8 collections related to 16, 116–119, 120–122,
Goldsmid, Peter 181 122n1; posters 59, 113; precautions against
GoMA. See Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow) 117; responses to 113. See also Antarang sex
Gone With the Wind (novel) 239 museum
González, Jennifer 21 HIV Vereniging Nederland 119–120
Gould, Deborah 104–105 Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (exhibition) 53n3
Gozen, Tomoe 10 Hokusai, Katsushika 46, 51
Gran Fury 73 Holland, Anthony 67n9
Grob, Bart 118 Holm, Mona 200
Güner, Agah Oktay 92 homoeroticism 60
Güney, Yılmaz 96–97 homoerotic items, search results for 67n9
Gurian, Elaine Heumann 234 homonationalism 280
homophobia 11, 64, 85, 113–114
Habermas 110 homosexuality 8, 10, 51, 57, 59, 69, 76, 115, 117,
habitus 34–36, 35 122n6, 232, 234, 255, 269; Dutch tolerance for
Halberstam, J. Jack 2–3, 70, 159, 255, 266, 117; partial decriminalization of 69
268, 286 homosexuals 8, 11, 76, 106, 255, 282. See also
Halperin, David 70 gays and lesbians
hammam 98 Hoonaard, Lonneke van den 116
Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) 26, 28 Horstink, Colline 276n3
Haraway, Donna 172 Hoskin, Dawn 73
Harunobu, Suzuki 52 Hossain, Royeka Sakhawat 165n10
Hayden, Dolores 91 Hudson’s Bay Company 151
Hayden, Malin 6 Huis Marseille (Amsterdam) 116
HBC. See Hudson’s Bay Company human rights 6–7, 10, 16–18, 31–33, 212;
Hello Kitty 9 activism 7, 15, 284; framework 64, 280; social
Henderson, Nick 86 justice work 275
heritage, cultural 91, 198–200; collectors 201; humor 149
digitization 198–199; dissemination 198; hunger strikes, by Leftist inmates 92, 99n3
projects 225. See also curation, electronic Hunt, Hayden 182–183
Heritage Laboratory 289 HVN. See HIV Vereniging Nederland
300 Index
ICBR. See Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform
ICOM. See International Council of Museums
identities 15, 21, 25–26, 33–37, 52, 60, 65–66,
70, 94, 96, 106, 128, 146–147, 150, 169, 173,
224, 226–227, 235, 256, 258, 261, 271,
279–281, 283–286, 290; androgynous 66;
formation 24, 33; gender 2, 64–66, 94, 96,
134, 227, 255–256, 266, 280; group 59;
nonbinary 168–169; non-normative 106;
sexual 57–59, 109, 236
Igloliorte, Heather 146
IHLIA. See Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch
Informatiecentrum en Archief
Ik M/V (I – M/F) (exhibition) 268
India: spatial segregation of cities 102; women,
and sexuality 16
indigeneity 16, 23–25, 128, 134, 150; and gender
in museums 128
Indigenous bodies 9, 16, 145, 147, 151; historical
implications of 147; sacred 151; shame
associated with 147; sovereignty through
exhibitions 16; use and abuse of 9
Indigenous cultures 133, 141
Indigenous decolonial thought, place-based
foundation of 146
Indigenous erasure, representational violence
of 133
Indigenous knowledge 152
Indigenous land-connected practices 146
Indigenous life 137, 139, 141
Indigenous Mexican culture 24, 25
Indigenous peoples 128, 133–134, 139–141,
145–148, 146, 147, 151; fighting colonialism
151; in institutional spaces 145–146; IQ (Inuit
Qaujimajatuqangit) 146; recognizing
contributions of 146; sovereignty 151;
thinkers 151
Indigenous women 128, 139, 146–147; art 148;
Christianity and 147; desires 147; focused
exhibitions 146; warrior power 147
Inkerö, Jesus 256, 257
Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch Informatiecentrum en
Archief 116, 122n5, 280
International Council of Museums 31, 289;
codes of ethics 31; definition of museum
81–82
International Gay/Lesbian Information Center
and Archive. See Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch
Informatiecentrum en Archief
“International Gay Solidarity” banner 86
Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic
Sites (book) 6
intersectional feminist theories, and digital
museum objects 199
intersectional thinking 279
intersex 256, 268; depictions of 255;
people 267
interseXion (exhibition) 267
interventions 16, 26, 33, 40, 108, 142, 158, 160,
162, 282–283; temporary interpretive 52
Intimate Worlds: Exploring Sexuality through the Sir
Henry Wellcome Collection (exhibition) 54n20
Inuit: art 146–147; Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ)
146, 152; teachings 149; women 148
invoked art 23, 24, 26
IQ. See Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit
Ireland 75; ceramics, Victoria & Albert Museum
holdings of 75; change in social attitudes in 207;
women’s campaign against Eighth Amendment
207; women’s history records 208–209
Irish Abortion Rights Referendum, 2018 17, 207
Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform 211
Irish Constitution 207
Irish Free State 208
Ishigami, Aki 45
Islands of Decolonial Love (book) 147
It’s Good to be on the Wrong Side (exhibition) 269
Iziko Gallery, South Africa 267
Jacobs, Harriet 239
Japan: shunga exhibition in 52; popular culture,
female representation 9–10
Japanese art, interest in 52
Jersey Heritage 267
Johannesson, Åsa 16–17, 167–170, 172, 176,
253, 256, 258–259, 260, 266; interview with
259–263, 260; theoretical approach 253; work
of 259
Jones, Rubyyy 63
Jones-Hogu, Barbara 160
Jorgensen, Christine 267
Jubilee Ball Fund 192
Junior Women’s Committee 194n3. See also
Women’s Committees
Justice and Development Party 90, 93
JUSTIN (artwork) 257
juvenile inmates, experiences in Ulucanlar Prison
97, 98
JWC. See Junior Women’s Committee
kabuki actors 52
Kaineus 170
Kali iconography 159–160
Kamathipura 102, 107, 110
Karp, Ivan 39
kawaii 9, 10
Kelly, Mary 231
Ken. To Be Destroyed (artwork) 62, 268
Kerkhof, Martijn van de 115
Khakhar, Bhupen 101
Khusra: Stains and Stencils (exhibition) 267
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art 257
Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do
poster 73
 Index 301

Kleist, Makka 149 Life Scenes of Master Shantarakshita (artwork) 163

Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Light in the Darkness/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting
Sciences and Humanities (book) 197 Identity, Spirituality, Reality (book) 23
Kopke. Jaime 82 Limon, Imara 254
Kumbier, Alana 279 LISG. See Lesbian Immigration Support Group
Kurdish women 95, 98n2 Little, Blake 256, 257–258
Little, Niki 146
labeling 73–74, 167–168, 171, 173, 176, 236 Little Gay History – Desire and Diversity around the
labels 9, 40, 48, 61, 73–74, 82, 160, 167–168, Globe, A (book) 52
170, 202–203, 258 LMAS. See Ladies’ Memorial Associations
La Biennale d’Art Contemporain Autochtone 146 London Pride weekend 66, 67
labor movement 197, 220 Lonely Surfer Squaw (artwork) 150
Ladies’ Anatomy museum 105 Looking Out, Looking in (artwork) 259
Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Natural History Society of Lorde, Audre 16, 39
New Brunswick 187 Lorenz, Renate 281
Ladies’ Memorial Associations 242 Los Angeles 26–27
landscape 8, 93, 133, 137, 142, 145, 148–153 Love Bites (artwork) 256
Latina artists 27–28 Love is Not a Crime: 10 Years of the Lesbian
Latina identities 27 Immigration Support (exhibition) 225
Latin America 26–27 Lownsbrough, Peggy 191
Latin American art 27, 28 Luna, James 127–128
Latin American identities 27, 28 Lundin, Olle 12–13, 254, 280
latinidad 28
Latreus 170 MA. See Museums Association of UK
“lavender marriages” 85 Magdalene laundry system 213–214
Lavine, Steven D. 39 Malbeuf, Amy 148
Lawrie, Alastair 86 Malherbe, Suzanne. See Moore, Marcel
Lean To (I) and (II) (artworks) 150 Malone, Brenda 182
Lee, Vernon 64 Malraux, André 175
Le Couteur, Clair 266 Manchester Digital Music Archive 224
Le Couteur, Peter. See Le Couteur, Clair manga library 10
Lefebvre, Henri 91 Mardi Gras Museum 85–87
Lesbian Immigration Support Group 224 Marshall, Alex 290
lesbians 6, 10, 12–13, 15, 52, 59, 60, 61–62, 70, Marstine, Janet 31–34
73–74, 95, 222, 225, 227, 231–232, 234, Martin, Lee-Ann 145, 146
255–256; encounter with shunga on 52–53 Maryland Historical Society 39–40
Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants 64 masculinity 61, 75, 232, 248, 257–259, 261
Levin, Amy 276n1 Massey, Doreen 91
LGBT History Month 62–63, 67 “master’s house” 40. See also Lorde, Audre
LGBTQ+ 5–6, 11–13, 17, 57, 59, 63, 65, 69, 73, Mattachine Society 255
74, 75, 84, 91, 93, 221, 226; activism 64–65, Mattie, Herbert 117
219, 221–222; aspects of objects 59–60, 61; McCray, Chirlane 181, 182
communities 17, 83, 120, 182, 219–222, 256, McCrossin, Julie 86
269, 275; as coproducers and audiences 182; McGavock, Carrie 240
definitions 13; exhibits, venues for 84; GLAM McKay, Richard 118
(Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) McMaster, Meryl 150
66; histories 59–60, 61, 65, 115, 116, 222, McQueen, Alexander 73
227–228, 269; individuals 11, 17, 59, 73, 86, McTavish, Lianne 187
255; inmates 92, 94–95; intimacies and MDACS. See Mumbai District AIDS Control
sexualities 77; labels mentioning 11, 59, 73; Society
lives of 6; museum workers 64–65, 67; neglect MDMA. See Manchester Digital Music Archive
in Dutch museums 59, 116; populations 40; Me, Myself & Eye (artwork) 256
programming 77; terminology 59–60; tour 73; Mechowski, Amy 62
trail 52. See also gay, lesbian, bisexuality, mediation 279
nonbinary gender, transgender memorialization 90, 93, 159
LGBTQ Welcoming Guidelines for Museums Memorialize Turkey Group investigation report
37n2 97–98
302 Index
Message, Kylie 7
Messenger, The (artwork) 162–163
metal casting models 72
#metoo campaign 5, 17, 182
Metropolis (artwork) 163
Mexico 27
MGM. See Mardi Gras Museum
Middleton, Craig 7
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
(novel) 240
Migration Museum in Adelaide 85
Mihalache, Irina 182
Mining the Museum (exhibition) 39
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle 134, 135
MNBAQ. See Musée National des Beaux-Arts du
Québec
Mnemosyne Atlas (artwork) 175
modernity 25–26
MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art
Monkman, Kent 128, 133
monogamy 105–106
Mooij, Annet 114
Moore, Clover 86
Moore, Lamont 232
Moore, Marcel 266, 267
MoTHA. See Museum of Transgender Hirstory
and Art
Motture, Peta 72
“Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology”
(article) 233
Muholi, Zanele 181–182
Mumbai 41, 102
Mumbai District AIDS Control Society 101
Muncaster, Ron 86
Muñoz, José Esteban 157–158, 281
musealization process 90–91, 93
Musée Imaginaire 175
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec 146
museological display, feminist future for 157; Eyes
of Time (artwork) 157, 158–162; Scorpion
Gesture, The (artwork) 157, 162–163; Tales of
Amnesia (artwork) 158–159
Museum Activism (book) 181
Museum of Liverpool 266
Museum of Modern Art (New York) 232,
233–234
Museum of Sex (New York) 6, 82
Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art 7, 268
museum professionals 21, 23, 26, 31, 40, 121,
176, 189–190, 192, 198–199, 208
museums 6, 21, 26, 39, 40, 181, 265; ambiguity
and controversy 127–128; co-constructed
spaces 26; as colonized structure 25;
conventional forms of display 133; critical
examination of 6; cultural production practices
in 21, 24, 26, 27; de-practices 278; digitization
199; display forms 128, effects of 91–92; ethics
for, see ethics; functions as heterotopia 282; and
galleries, patriarchal values of 5–6; ICOM
definition of 81–82; objects 198, 200;
performative strategies 13; photography
171–176; practices 82, 85; queering of 60;
relocating focus 290–291; scholarly discourse
about 5–7; scholarship 84; spaces 16, 64, 85,
91, 128, 149; texts 9; traditional vs. Denver
Community Museum (DCM) 82, vs. pop-up
museums 82; writing 7
Museums, Moralities and Human Rights (book) 6–7
Museums Association of UK 31, 64–65
Museums Australia 31
Museum Secretum 40, 46, 47
museum studies 7
Mushrif, Hasan 105
NAMENproject Stichting 119–120
nanshoku 52
“Nashville Declaration” 122n7
National AIDS Control Organization 106–107
National AIDS Control Program 105
National Museum of Ireland 17, 182; Irish
women’s history records 208–209; Repeal the
Eighth social movement collection 209–212
National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC)
84, 265
Nesbitt, Sarah 145
Netherlands 113; first AIDS monument in 116;
progressive stance on homosexuality 115
Neugebauer, Daniel 254
Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+
Rights (exhibition) 17, 182, 219;
community-curated exhibition 222–224, 223;
content of 221; coproduction of 219–220;
funding of 221; goals of 221; impacts and
power sharing 227–228; LGBTQ+ history tour
221; project partners 221–222; public programs
226–227; supplementary exhibitions 224–226
New Museology (book) 39
new museum ethics 31, 32; assumptions in 34; as
disciplinary technology of citizenship 35;
Marstine’s account of 36; vision of 32
New Museum of New York 267
NGU. See Never Going Underground: The Fight for
LGBT+ Rights exhibition
Nichiwamiském/Nimidet/Ma Soeur/My Sister
(exhibition) 146
NMI. See National Museum of Ireland
Noh masks 173
nonbinary experience: Aeschylus 170–171;
Dionysus 170
nonbinary gender 9, 14, 256, 259, 267; depictions
of 255; difference 167, 176–177; identities, in
classical museum collections 10, 168–171; trans
identities 167, 168, 169, 266
non-transgender 14. See also cisgender
 Index 303

Normal Work (artwork) 281 Prinner, Anton 66

normativity 104, 152, 280 prisoners 40, 95. See also Ulucanlar Prison, Ankara
novels, romance 240, 243 prison museums 91–92, 93. See also Ulucanlar
nudity 9 Prison, Ankara
prisons 90–92, 96, 97. See also Ulucanlar Prison,
Old Futures (book) 158 Ankara
Old South, The 239, 240 professionalization 34
onnagata 10, 52 proto-feminist spaces 17
Onursal, Sevim 98n2 public health 114
Opening Doors group 73–74 PUMQH. See Pop-Up Museum of Queer
Other Stories (exhibition) 69 History
Outing the Past organization 62 punishment, gendered history of 90
Out in the Museum (blog) 58 Purchase Fund (Art Gallery of Ontario) 188–189,
Out on Display (booklet) 61 191, 192
Owen, Craig 172 Purchase Fund Committee (Art Gallery of
Ontario) 192
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (exhibit series) 26 PWAs. See people with AIDS
Paiva, Margarida 203 PYP. See Play Your Part
Palazzo Nuovo 171
Papararo, Jenifer 145 Queer Art of Failure, The (book) 159
Parkinson, Richard B. 52 Queer British Art (exhibition) 10, 17
Passionate Art of Utamaro, The (exhibition) 54n6 queer futurity, theory of 157
“Penguin Sex and Stolen Artifacts: Museum Queer Glossary (resource) 280
Tours Through a New Lens” (article) 290 queering: arguments 32–33, 60, 279, 280
People’s History Museum 17, 219, 220, 221 Queering the Collection Inventory, Inventory of Queer
Performance/performativity 13, 24, 36, 62, 75, Aspects of the Art Collection (resource) 12, 280
128, 134–135, 139–141, 145, 149–150, 232, Queering the Collections network 116
235, 257, 281, 284 Queering the Museum (exhibition) 7, 69, 85
Petry, Michael 253 queer label audit of galleries 61
Philbin, Ann 26 queerness 10–11, 12, 15, 70, 159; decolonial
PHM. See People’s History Museum museum practice 128, 133–143; ethics 15,
Pictures for a Picture of Gertrude Stein as a Collector 35–37; museum workers, activism and agency of
and Writer on Art and Artists (exhibition) 64–65; possibility, speculative narratives
232, 233 157–158
Pine Seedlings on the First Rat Day (artwork) 51 Queer Noise: The History of LGBT+ Music & Club
Plaat, Dorien 272 Culture in Manchester (exhibition) 224
plantation museums 240, 241, 244–251. See also “Queer & Now” Friday Late (event) 61, 63
Alexander, Tamera queer objects. See LGBTQ+ aspects of objects
Play Your Part project 221 Queer Phenomenology (book) 282
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art 145, 151. Queer Sign Glossary (resource) 284
See also Entering the Landscape queer theory 15, 158, 232
Plumwood, Val 168–169 queer working group at V&A 16, 40, 57, 58, 59,
polder (Dutch model of consensus-building) 114 61–62; Being Human festival 64; LGBT
polygamy 106 History Month 62–63; LGBTQ+-themed
polyvocal museum presentations 92 Friday Lates 63–64, 64
Pope, Pat 74 Que me veux-tu? (or What Do You Want from Me?
Pop Life: Art in a Material World (exhibition) 54n8 1929) (book) 172
Pop-Up Museum of Queer History 83, 84, 85 quilt, HIV/AIDS 119, 121
pop-up museums 40, 81–87, 290 quotidian objects 289
pornography, Western 6 Qwearing the Collection (project)
Portraits of Him (artwork) 259 12, 283
postcolonial feminism, and electronic curation
198–199 race 8–9, 15, 17, 21, 23, 76, 135, 199, 256, 279;
Pratt, Mary Louise 108 and gender, ideologies of 17
Prévert, Jacques 66 Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
Pride marches 223 (exhibition) 22, 26–28, 27
Prince, Richard 54n8 Rainbow Body (artwork) 163
304 Index

Rainbow Families, outreach project with 74 Sequeira, Rovel 6

RAMM. See Royal Albert Memorial Museum Sertel, Sabiha 98n2
rape, of black lesbians and transgender people 181 sex and sexuality 6, 7–9, 12, 17, 31, 40, 149, 182;
Rawson, K.J. 167 binaries 9, 14; discomfort around 149; displays
rebodying 150, 151 6; diversity 269; education 102, 105, 110; and
Reclamation (artwork) 150 HIV/AIDS, messages about 41; liberalization
Red Skin, White Masks (book) 146 of attitudes towards 47, 50, 53; narratives
Relate to Your Heritage (artwork)160 governing 182; normative behavior 104;
religious diversity 269 nonnormativity 111n4
“Remember the Ulucanlar Massacre” 98 sex assignment 14
Rensma, Anne 254 sex museums 6, 106, closure 111. See also
Repeal the Eighth social movement Antarang sex museum
209–214, 210 Sex Museums (book) 6
resistance, radical 152 sex-reassignment surgery 267
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, collection of 118 sexual abuse, of juvenile inmates 97, 98
Rolik, Michael 86 “Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, The”
Romero, Almudena 73 (essay) 290
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 12 sexual identity 57
roundtables, weekend 269 Sexuality and Space (book) 282
Royal Albert Memorial Museum 54n20 sexually explicit images 47
Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) 2016 Sexual Offences Act of 1967 221
exhibition 52 sexual violence, shunga 48
Ryan, Deborah E. 289 sex workers 102, 103; in Chennai 106; education
Ryan, Hugh 83, 85 108; in Kamathipura 110. See also Antarang sex
museum
sadomasochism 256 Shah, Svati 107, 110
safe sex practices 117 Shaheen, Qasim Riza 267
SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience
(exhibition) 146 (exhibition) 128, 133; affective force of loss and
Salish culture 147 mourning 139–140; archival documents
Salon Outré 63 141–142; beaver 135; colonial legacy 134;
same-sex love, in Japan: shunga exhibition 50–51 cross-dressing (wo)man 134; Daddies and
Sandell, Richard 6–7 history paintings 137–139; erotic triangulation
Sanders, Stephan 8 135; forms of museum display 133; material
San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Committee artifacts 133; modernism and indigeneity 134;
85, 86 on tour 142–143; premise 133; regional
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 234 specificity 142; starvation table and vitrine
Sarang, Prakash 101, 104, 105–106, 110, 111 135–137; as time traveler throughout 134;
Scent of a Beaver (artwork) 134 Wilderness Kingdom (artwork) 141
Schwarzer, Marjorie 188, 191 Shiva, 114; Kushan sculpture of 61
Schwob, Lucy 172. See also Claude Cahun Shun’ei, Katsukawa 48
Scottish Transgender Alliance 6 shunga 6, 16, 18n6, 40, 46–47, 48, 49, 51, 52–53;
scrapbooks 60–61, 121 Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ
Screech, Timon 48 Histories (exhibition) 52–53
Secret Cabinet at National Archaeological Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art 1600–1900
Museum 46 (exhibition) 45, 47–49, 50–51, 51, 52, 53;
secret collections, for sexually explicit works 46 assessing potential visitors’ reactions to 47–48;
secret museums 46 disclaimer at entrance 49; erotic scenes 51;
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (exhibition) galleries 49; impact of 52; interpretation of
235, 236 sexual assault scene 48; marketing 49;
Seidman, Steven 122n6 “Masterpieces of Shunga” section of 48; public
Sekhmet, Egyptian statue of 159 response 50–51; sensitive issues around 48–50;
“Self-Heterotopia” 280 summative evaluation 50–51; violence in
self-portraiture 259 48–49; works depicting children 49
self-presentation, control of 74 Silhouette in the Graveyard (artwork) 162
Sender, Katherine 108 Silverman, Kaja 281
Sentence, Nathan 37 silversmiths 72
 Index 305

Simpson, Betasamosake 152 To Whisper Her Name tour 244

Skrubbe, Jessika 6 Toxic (artwork) 281
Skyllas, Dimitrios 71 TransAmsterdam 272, 273, 276n3
slavery 17, 239, 241, 242 Trans-Anders 271
Smith, Matt 69–70. See also Victoria and Albert trans curatorship 66
Museum, Smith’s artist residency at TranScreen 2017 274
Sneeuwloper, Mirjam 254, 272–273, 276n1, transgender 6, 7, 14, 170, 256, 257, 265, 266,
276n4 267, 268; April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady
social class 9, 39 (exhibition) 266; artists 66; celebrities 256;
social hierarchies 91 communities 18, 255; creating displays related
social inequalities 267 to 265; definition 265–267; depictions of 255;
Socialist Feminist Movement ROSA identities, in museum collections 168–171;
(Reproductive rights against Oppression, inclusion 15
Sexism, and Austerity) 210 Transgender, Gender, and Psychoanalysis
socialization 34 (exhibition) 267
social justice, commitments to 181 Transgenders Amsterdam 271–272, 276n3
social media 274 transgender theory 15
social world 34 Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects 268
SoHo Memory Project 84 Transmission (exhibition) 12, 18, 254, 265, 268,
Soldiers and Chiefs: The Irish at War and Abroad from 270, 275
1550 to the Present Day (exhibition) 208 transparency, radical 37n9
sovereignty 151 Trans* Tapes 271
Soviet silent films 163 Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics
space 91; destruction, Ulucanlar Prison 93; and of Visibility (book) 7
disruption 279; rendition 93 Trigger: Gender as Tool and Weapon (exhibition) 267
Spiritual America 1983 (exhibition) 54n8 Turkish Republic 90, 91; leftist politics 95;
Squires, Eddie 60 rebellion against regimes in 40; spatial history
Staffordshire figure groups 74 of incarceration in 92–97
Stedelijk Museum, projects at 116 Tyburczy, Jennifer 6, 31, 105, 111
Stein, Gertrude 17, 182, 231–234, 235–236,
235, 238 uaajeerneq mask dancing 149
Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian UCTEA 94
Avant Garde, The (exhibition) 234, 235 Uçurtmay Vurmasinlar (Don’t Let Them Shoot the
stereotypes, of women 9, 10, 190; gender 9, Kite) (film) 97
105, 208 UK Coroners and Justice Act of 2009 49
stigmatization 114 Ulucanlar Prison, Ankara 16, 40, 90–98, 98n2,
Still Life with Flowers (artwork) 191 99n4. See also prison museums
Stroke (artwork)149 unbodied, being 147
Strong, Roy 65 Unbodied Rebirth (artwork)148
Sullivan, Nikki 7 Under Your Nose (2015) (film) 62
survivance 151 Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in
Sverdljuk, Jana 182 Contemporary Women’s Art in the US, The
Swing, The (artwork) 134 (exhibition) 17
Sydney LGBTQ+ pop-up museum 16. See also Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and
Mardi Gras Museum Architects (UCTEA) 93
Unravelling the National Trust (exhibition)
Tales of Hanuman (comic book)158 69–70
Taylor, Becca 146 unruliness 288
T2 Community Collective 86 “unruly women”, and museum activism 182
This Wound is a World (poetry book)147 Utamaro, Kitagawa 46, 48
Thom, Danielle 62
Thorvaldsens Museum 175 V&A. See Victoria and Albert Museum
Tilsam (artwork)150 Vagnone, Franklin D. 289
Timiga, Nunalu Sikulu (My Body, The Land and Van Abbemuseum 13, 18, 122n8, 254, 274, 280,
The Ice) (artwork)149 282, 285
Toklas, Alice 233 Van Pest tot AIDS (exhibition) 116–117
touch 84 Vargas, Chris E. 268
306 Index

Venir, Alice 12, 280 Widow of the South, The (novel) 240
Ventrella, Francesco 64 Wildt, Annemarie de 254
Vergo, Peter 39 Williamson, Laakkuluk Bathory 149, 150
victimhood 241 Wilson, Fred 39
Victoria and Albert Museum 16, 59, 61, 66, 69, Winchester, Oliver 57, 67
70, 71–74, 71, 77, 77n1, 78n2. See also Winter, Carl 65
outreach projects Witches, Faggots, Dykes, and Poofters (film) 86
Victoria and Albert Museum LGBTQ working witness seminars 118–119
group 16, 40, 57, 58, 59, 61–62, 66, 67, Witt, George 46
68n17; Being Human festival 64; LGBT Wojnarowicz, David 84–85
History Month 62–63; LGBTQ+-themed women 5, 7, 9–10, 12, 17, 21, 27, 40, 46, 50, 52,
Friday Lates 63–64, 64 59, 90, 92–99, 105, 109, 134, 145–147,
visitors 12, 27, 39, 61, 86, 96, 98, 240, 241, 270, 187–195, 197, 199–204, 207–208, 210–211,
291; of Antarang 108–110; responses, to shunga 220, 224, 233, 242–244, 248–249, 259, 261,
exhibition 50–52 272; domestic labor 181; ecstasy 51; fictions as
Vissers, Geert. See Zelluf, Hellun fact, selling 239–250; issues 181; lives,
Vizenor, Gerald 151 importance of 17; museum activism 181–183,
Vo, Dan 62 187–194; oppression of 182, 183; prison
Voices of the Epidemic (film) 121, 123n14 experiences 92; rights and needs 181;
Volcano, Del LaGrace 256–257 stereotypes about 9, 10, 190
Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and
wakashu 10, 52, 54n13 the Gendering of Knowledge (book) 5
Warburg, Aby 175 women-born-as-women 6
warning signs: for controversial material 32; Women’s Committees (Art Gallery of Toronto/
performative 33; queering 32–33; at shunga Ontario) 17, 187–194, 194n4. See also Art
exhibit 49 Gallery of Ontario and Junior Women’s
Wekker, Gloria 282 Committee
Welcoming Guidelines (American Alliance of Women’s March for Choice, 2017 202
Museums) 12 Women’s Society at the Edmonton Art
Wellcome Collection, London 54n20 Gallery 187, 188
Wendt, Lionel 8–9, 17 women’s unit, Ulucanlar Prison 92
White, Leanne 91
White/whiteness: hegemonic ideologies 266; Yano, Akiko 45
interrogations of 37
Whitelaw, Anne 187–188 Zana, Leyla 95, 98n2
Whitman, Walt 11 Zelluf, Hellun 119
Why Am I Here? Open Call for Trans and Intersex Zondervan 243
Artists residency project 285 Zorlutuna, Alize 149