Museum Queeries: Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and LGBTTQ* Interventions into Museums, Archives, and Curating

This book explores Two-Spirit and LGBTTQ* contributions to and interventions in museums and museum studies, both as a means of addressing structural exclusions and of opening new modes of productive inquiry and activism. Building on the inroads that have been made into existing museological practice and scholarship, the collection brings new voices and concerns to the field. For the contributors to this volume, “queering the museum” is not only about addressing representations of gender and sexuality, but also challenging white privilege, racism, and settler colonialism among other structures of oppression as they operate alongside and with heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in and beyond museums, archives, and galleries. To challenge these norms in the context of museums and other knowledge producing institutions means that “queering” must also, simultaneously and inextricably, be decolonial. That is, queering and decolonizing are inseparable strategies if we understand that heteronormativity and gender binaries are constructions that stem from colonial logics and are upheld by colonial institutions. The book features essays by artists, curators, and scholars—emerging and established—from a range of disciplines including Art History, Cultural Studies, Curatorial Studies, English, Indigenous Studies, Museum Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Angela Failler is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory at the University of Winnipeg. Her research is focused on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with the “difficult knowledge” and ongoing effects of historical traumas and injustice. She leads a long-term study on public memory and the 1985 Air India bombings. She is a founding member of the Thinking Through the Museum network and co-leads the Museum Queeries project. She is also the founding Director of the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies (CRiCS).

Sabrina Mark obtained her PhD in English Literature from the University of Manitoba. She contributed a chapter to Reflections on Our Relationships with Anne of Green Gables: Kindred Spirits (2021) and co-edited a special issue of Global Media Journal — Canadian Edition on “Memorial Reckoning and the Fall of Imperial Icons” (2022). Her research examines fictional depictions of gender and race in the context of nation-building in the early twentieth century.

Michelle McGeough (Cree Métis/Settler) completed her PhD in Indigenous art history at the University of New Mexico. Prior to returning to school for her advanced degree, she taught Museum Studies at the Institute of American Indian Art and was the Assistant curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the Native American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dr. McGeough currently teaches at Concordia University in the Art History department and is a co-lead of the Museum Queeries research project.

Heather Milne is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and one of the co-leads of the Museum Queeries research project. Her research and teaching focus on gender, sexuality, cultural studies, and literature. She is the author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics (2018) and editor of Social Poesis: The Poetry of Syd Zolf (2019). Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including differences, Humanities, Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and The Review of Pedagagy, Education, and Cultural Studies.