Queer Museum: A Possibility

Essay Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 JULIO-DICIEMBRE 2023 JULY-DECEMBER 2023 OJS Queer Museum: A Possibility Ir a la versión en español DOI: 10.30763/Intervencion.285.v2n28.64.2023 • YEAR 14, ISSUE NO. 28: 27-37 Submitted: 30.06.2023 Índice / Contents • Accepted: 18.08.2023 • Published: 16.02.2024 Benjamín J. M. Martínez Castañeda POSIBILIDADUTOPÍAGUIONALTERNATIVACUERPOESPERANZAPOLÍTICAINTERSECCIÓNESPACIOPERFORMÁTICO MUSEO QUEER Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam), México | orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6624-0099 Translated by Carmen M. Plascencia ABSTRACT This essay presents a series of concerns about the museum as an institution, which has been validated by patriarchal and heteronormative strategies, such as looting, invasion, objectification, and exclusion. From this, the idea of queering the museum and reversing its normative effects emerged, aiming to achieve inclusivity and to bring dignity to the bodies and subjectivities that this institution has silenced and excluded from discourses. Therefore, the utopia of a queer museum is proposed as the future territory for these subjectivities to claim their history. KEYWORDS museology, queer theory, gender studies, aesthetics. L et us begin by mentioning that the museum is a semiotic-political architectural complex (Preciado, 2019, pp. 19-23) in which power and knowledge are generated, something that can be clearly observed in the distribution of resources. For instance, the areas of research, curatorship, and museography are assigned resources in much greater quantities1 than those assigned to social communication and educational mediation. This complex is The reviewers of this article have insisted that I “support” this statement. Although this is not the space to debate it, I am not going to do so if they are not willing to assume that, in museums, the organizational chart and the distribution of the budget are a caste system. It is something that is seen, felt, and experienced by those of us who work in cultural mediation, where many times we do it without payment. Thus, to support the statement and provide figures and hard data of this inequality would be to fall into hegemonic systems, where if what you reported is not measurable and verifiable, it does not exist, leading to emotions, experiences, and affections being silenced. 1 Queer Museum: A Possibility CONVOCATORIA 2023 CALL FOR PAPERS 2023 27 Essay Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 JULIO-DICIEMBRE 2023 JULY-DECEMBER 2023 OJS POSIBILIDADUTOPÍAGUIONALTERNATIVACUERPOESPERANZAPOLÍTICAINTERSECCIÓNESPACIOPERFORMÁTICO MUSEO QUEER Índice / Contents also seen, otherwise, in the location of each department;2 that is, those of curatorship and museography have privileged spaces, while the mediation department is usually relegated to small spaces and unfavorable locations. An example could be the Museo de la Ciudad de México (Museum of Mexico City), where on the left side of the main staircase there is an office for the curatorship, while on the right is a hidden mezzanine office in which mediators, social communication workers, and social service providers coexist. Asking ourselves if it costs the same to produce an exhibition as it does an educational program is to reinforce the dynamics of power-knowledge. In this regard, Foucault (1980) mentions that “power relations are embedded in other types of relationships (production, alliance, family, sexuality), where they play a role that is both conditioning and conditioned” (Foucault, p. 170).3 They have, I add, a specific purpose, constructing the so-called truth and legitimizing stories (discourses) which, in a museum, take shape in the unequal distribution of resources and spaces as well as in the tasks of each area; for instance, the location of the curator in relation to the museographer, and the location of both in relation with the educational mediator. The example could be those who perform social service: people who have completed their undergraduate education and that must complete hours of unpaid labor and that most of the time—although they could work in almost any area of the museum—are more commonly found in educational departments, guiding tours, or teaching artistic workshops, less professional tasks that tend to turn arts into handicrafts. In that sense, for Paul Preciado, the semiotic-political architecture of the museum “is a performative apparatus that produces both the object and the subject it claims to represent” (Preciado, 2019, p. 21). On the one hand, the museum is constituted by authorities, such as the director and the chief curator, who issue the official truth discourses, and, lower in the hierarchy, the museographers, subordinates of the curator, with the function of materializing the latter’s ideas.4 On the other hand, the museum receives an object to give it a story or place it in a historical space, regardless of whether the venue is dedicated to history, anthropology, art, or science. It is up to the researcher, museologist, and curator to I further the previous note with the college definition of departamento (department) from the Dictionary of the Spanish Language; the forth meaning says: “In colleges, administrative unit of teaching and research, constituted by one or several professorships with common interests.” 3 Editorial translation. All quotes are translations from the original texts in Spanish. 4 I do not deny the creative character of the museographer, but it is important to mention that his creative capacity must consider the objectives of the curator, who designs the legitimizing discourses. 2 Queer Museum: A Possibility CONVOCATORIA 2023 CALL FOR PAPERS 2023 28 Essay Intervención ISSN 2448-5934 JULIO-DICIEMBRE 2023 JULY-DECEMBER 2023 OJS POSIBILIDADUTOPÍAGUIONALTERNATIVACUERPOESPERANZAPOLÍTICAINTERSECCIÓNESPACIOPERFORMÁTICO MUSEO QUEER Índice / Contents frame the object in a discourse that is understood and to uphold “the truth” that is attributed to it. The museum also questions the subjects to determine them as its users, audiences, or publics. And here I wonder from where and who can validate these identity constructions and who is represented in that space. Now, I would like to recover the notion of the exhibition as a war machine proposed by Didi-Huberman (2011, p. 25), and that of the museum as a device capable of following, or contradicting, the guidelines of the State, which allows us to reconsider the two faculties of power: one, potestas, with which it exercises it over the bodies, reifying and administering them; and the other, poietic, with which it can design its own discourses (Foucault, 1980, pp. 103-110 ). An example of potestas faculty would be a national history or art museum such as the National Museum of Art (Munal), in Mexico, in which the discourse ranges from the viceregal to the art of the first half of the 20th century, and the images exhibited are the same ones that have been introjected by the edu (...truncated)