Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism

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, she was a visiting professor in Public History at the University of Amsterdam in fall 2017.

"This wonderfully eclectic and engaging book discusses a huge variety of innovative practices – and it will sustain and push forward the shared enterprise of creating queer and feminist museum spaces." – Alison Oram, Leeds Beckett University, UK"Wide-ranging, forceful and keyed to our moment, this book has an unabashed political agenda: to make the museum safe for the depiction of sexual, cultural and gender difference. In so doing, it’s alive to the irony that a site of exploration and education is so often in reality merely a place for the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Through a series of case studies, this book sketches an alternative path." – Jonathan D. Katz, University at Buffalo, USA

• I. Frameworks; 1. Introduction: Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism, Amy K. Levin; 2. Chicana Feminism, Anzalduian Borderland Practices, and Critiques of Museology, Amanda K. Figueroa; 3. Warning! Heteronormativity: A Question of Ethics, Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton; II. Dismantling the Master’s House?; A. Major Institutions; 4. Sex and Sensitivities: Exhibiting and Interpreting Shunga at the British Museum Stuart Frost; 5. Activists on the Inside: the Victoria and Albert Museum LGBTQ Working Group, Zorian Clayton and Dawn Hoskin; 6. Remolding the Museum: In Residence at the V&A, Matt Smith; B. Alternate Spaces; 7. Pop-up or Permanent? The Case of the Mardi Gras Museum, Tuan Nguyen; 8. Emptied, Displaced, Assimilated: Spatial Politics of Gender in Ankara Ulucanlar Prison Museum, Özge Kelekçi and Meral Akbaş; 9. Death of a Museum Foretold? On Sexual Display in the Time of AIDS in India, Rovel Sequeira; 10. Lost Objects and Missing Histories: HIV/AIDS in the Netherlands, Manon S. Parry and Hugo Schalkwijk; III. Bodies in the Museum?; A. Indigenous Bodies; 11. Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: Artist Curation as Queer and Decolonial Practice, Ann Cvetkovich; 12. All that Moves Us: Bodies in Land, Camille Georgeson-Usher; B. Bodies of Ambiguity; 13. The Future of Museological Display: Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters, Natasha Bissonauth; 14. Nonbinary Difference: Dionysus, Arianna, and the Fictive Arts of Museum Photography, Åsa Johannesson and Clair Le Couteur; IV. Acts of Resistance; A. Unruly Women; 15. The Absent History of Female Volunteers at the Art Gallery of Toronto, Irina D. Mihalache; 16. From Handmade Underwear to the Labor Movement: Women’s History at Digital Museum, Jana Sverdljuk; 17. Recording Change: Collecting the Irish Abortion Rights Referendum, 2018, Brenda Malone; B. Problematic Narratives; 18. Never Going Underground: Community Coproduction and the Story of LGBTQ+ Rights, Catherine O'Donnell; 19. Curating Gertrude Stein: Identity Politics in the Exhibition Catalogue, Hayden Hunt; 20. "[A] Battlefield All their Own": Selling Women’s Fictions as Fact at Plantation Museums, Joshua G. Adair; V. Thinking Outside the Binary Box; 21. On Gender Fluidity and Photographic Portraiture, Michael Petry; 22. Never A Small Project: Welcoming Transgender Communities into the Museum, Mirjam Sneeuwloper, Amy 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, Anne Rensma, Daniel Neugebauer, and Olle Lundin; 24. Conclusion, Joshua G. Adair