Queering the museum?

So, if the museum shapes identities and generates official discourses, what does it mean to queer it? First, it must be mentioned that the word queer has its origin in the degradation and repudiation of non-hegemonic subjectivities,⁷ but the contemporaneity of the term includes the significant reappropriation of the insult and the vindication through and against the discourses from which they were expelled ^{(Butler, 2010, p. 315)}. In that sense, queerness as politics has a power of action, as queering implies the study of the historical formation of alterities and the capacity to twist and deform historical discourses. Therefore, returning to what Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba mentions, queering can be read as “faggifying, turning fruity, divert, pervert, twist […], it means understanding the deviant as a subject of historical change in the cultural and political sphere […], it consists of opening an anti-hegemonic space for excluded, oppressed, and marginalized individuals” ^{(Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2019, pp. 17-18, 76)}. Thus, it is necessary to ask ourselves what it means to queer, twist, and faggify a museum.

In that sense, and to reinforce the idea of queer utopia, queering the museum “is an endless process and, perhaps more importantly, one without a definitive objective [...]. Queering the Museum, then, should be seen not as a model, but rather as a (necessarily incomplete) toolbox that can be used, expanded, and adapted in ways that are perhaps unimaginable” ^{(Sullivan & Middleton, 2020, p. 6)}. The tools to queer the museum are meant to make a harsh critique of it from its origins; for example, to question all those actions linked to looting and war trophies that composed the private collections today housed in national museums, to analyze why the museum heterosexualizes the lives of LGBTIQ+ artists, or why strike posters are neutralized on the walls of the museum. It would be worth mentioning the complete lack of sensitivity regarding the LGBTIQ+ visitors, the minute number of public programs that consider said visitors as audience, or the disregard for said subjectivities in the work groups.

Queering the museum implies understanding how sexuality classifies and polices culture. According to Nikki ^{Sullivan and Craig Middleton (2020)}, it goes beyond labeling it as gay. It is a promise, “a critical engagement that offers new meanings, new ways of thinking and acting politically” ^{(Duggan, 1992, p. 11} cited by ^{Su llivan & Middleton, 2020, p. 31)}. In this regard, Isabel Hufschmidt suggests erasing the idea that queerness is about minorities since they are represented as subaltern objects of marginalized groups instead of subjects of history and culture ^{(Hufschmidt, 2018, p. 30)}. It goes beyond inviting three drag queens to offer a staged tour of an exhibition, giving an online talk on LGBTIQ+ art on Pride Day, and placing the rainbow flag filter on Instagram in the month of June. This type of actions only shows that museums continue to see the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTIQ+) population as statistics and agendas. It is also studying, assuming, and questioning the museum as a patriarchal, elitist, and colonizing device, something that feminist, black, and third world artists have tried to make visible.

If we stop thinking about queer as a minority, we must see intersectionality-the intersections between body-gender-race-class-geographic location-as a methodology to criticize the heteronormativity of the museum as an institution, whether to show the contents established from heterosexual thought, the eroticism of whiteness in the curatorships of historical painting, the health discourses around slenderness, beauty, and physical condition, and even class privilege by asking ourselves who commissions works and how. This, in terms of what we see of the museum, but it is also necessary to do it in what we do not see: the collective labor contract, nepotism and cronyism in management and coordination positions, the share and distribution of resources for projects that are considered important, and a long etcetera.

The queer museum as a utopia

As has been widely mentioned in this essay, it is the space itself that produces its audience and its representations. This is important because this is where both taste and museum narratives are shaped; but now the question is who builds and who controls the museum as an institution. Answering it forces us to observe how limits are constantly managed. If we are looking for a participatory question, of inclusion or of making museums and communities, it is important to observe and transgress the limits of the museum, from the semiotic-architectural ones, to the methodologies it uses to organize the body, discipline taste, and model the imagination.

It is at this point where queerness appears, no longer as a methodology (queering), but as a utopia or possibility. In this regard, José Esteban Muñoz says that “Queerness is an ideality. In other words, we are not queer yet. We may never reach queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon tinged with potential” ^{(Muñoz, 2020, p. 29)}. Queer is imagining the future in the face of the fulminating present, it is dreaming of ourselves in a different then and a different there while we find new, more joyful ways of inhabiting the world.

Now, if we return to the semiotic-political sphere of the museum, both architecturally and exhibitively, we will have to rethink these edges based on the queer aesthetic proposed by José Esteban Muñoz, the borders between the museum as an architectural space and as an exhibition space are performative, for “it is not simply a being, but a doing, by and for the future. Queerness is, essentially, the rejection of a here and now, and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility of another world” ^{(Muñoz, 2020, p. 30)}. Thus, it would be valuable to see in queerness the possibility of transgressing the limits of the museum, no longer to construct alterities, as usually happens, but rather to imagine a space that represents and challenges us with dignity.

The queer possibility of the museum demands seeking an answer to the question, what is the museum we deserve? I have adjusted the question a bit: Douglas ^{Crimp (2005)} first posed it around why art history excludes sexual subcultures since “what is at stake is not history per se, which in any case is a fiction, but what history, whose history it is, and what is its intention” ^{(Crimp, 2005, p. 170)}. With the above, we seek to question the object and the subject at the same time, and see in queerness a historical richness to counteract heterosexist thinking, as well as the reification of corporalities through art.

Thinking about the queer museum is a specific/precise utopia, related “to historically situated battles, to a collectivity [it may] be like daydreaming, but therein are the hopes of a collective, of an emerging group, or even of a strange and lonely creature who dreams for many other people” ^{(Muñoz, 2020, p. 32)}. The queer museum will seek the restructuring of the collections, will make every cultural document a heritage possibility and, in pursuit of a common experience, will cancel all types of otherness.

The travestive museum as an example

The Museo Travestí del Perú (MTP) was born in 2004 as an initiative of the philosopher and drag artist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969-2013), with the purpose of inviting “to reread a colonized sexual history through the conjugation of various artistic disciplines [… ], to build a solid aesthetic and political project represented in performance, dance, exhibition, conference, and book” ^{(Campuzano, Lorenzo & Rodríguez, 2015, p. 46)}. The MTP reacts to the museum as a hegemonic space, first, because it does not have a specific location: it is a traveling museum; second, because it has no works of art, but cultural productions; and third, it does not have curators, but transvestite communities reconstructing their life stories.

The MTP is a relational artistic practice, conceived as “an art that would take as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the affirmation of an autonomous and private symbolic space” ^{(Bourriaud, 2008, p. 13)}. Thus, it is worth saying that the MTP as a relational artistic practice can help us designate it as a performative museum. Regarding this, Carla Pinochet Cobos says that it has the capacity for self-enunciation, regulates its own discursive fiction, and models its own device. Performative museums “are products and producers of their own projects, which, precisely from their doing, imagine peculiar ways of thinking and practicing it” ^{(Pinochet, 2016, p. 46)}; performative museums invite us to think about the realities that are outside the museum, different ways of managing heritage and architectural design without walls.

Based on the above, the MTP is a war machine, being

[…] a dialogue with space-to intervene and be intervened-moving away from the abstraction of the white cube as the continuity of the fragmented society. Each exhibition means occupation and assembly, but above all a dialogue between research project and curatorial project, a research that is always in progress and whose curatorship is its embodiment in the concrete space, and the experience of that curatorship as feedback ^{[Campuzano, 2013, p. 67]}.

On the basis of the museology of the MTP , the voice and memory of the transvestites cross all the hegemonic discourses to recover the history that was taken from them and with which they were stigmatized, and, by having it in their hands, they reappropriate it to reconstruct and validate themselves in the “reordering of the historical narrative from the transvestite point of view while denouncing the injustice to which they have been subjected. The transvestite, thus, stands as the only voice authorized to articulate their History” ^{(Campuzano, Lorenzo & Rodríguez, 2015, p. 47)}. Thus, the MTP is an example of a realized dream, a non-space that symbolizes the then and there of queer utopia.

Conclusions

Throughout this essay, the museum was presented as a totalizing space; that is, one that constructs official discourses and objectifies into otherness all cultural documents and all subjectivity that do not agree with its discourse. Likewise, museum architecture was studied from its semiotic-political sphere to understand that in its private part it is also a power relationship, both in the place it occupies in the organization chart, and in the location and spatiality of the site and the department in which work is done. The example used was the economic contrast between the curatorship department and, if it deserves the name, the educational mediation department, where the first has a fixed space and the second, not always.

Conversely, it was explained that the museum moves in heteronormative logics, which is to say that everything is modeled based on patriarchal thinking,⁸ and from there we seek to reach a queer museum, where queer functions as a strategy to question and dismantle power relations (patriarchal and heteronormative) in pursuit of recognition and inclusion of sexual diversity both in the organization chart and in the expository discourse. Queering the museum translates into seeking new meanings in the intersectionality of the body-gender-race-class-sexuality with the museum, as a concrete utopia for a better future for all those bodies excluded from the museum’s official discourses.

Therefore, a queer museum is a territory still to come, a way of insisting on, for, and from the institution for its transformation. A clear example of this is the Transvestite Museum of Peru, where drag queens, transvestites, faggots, dykes, and transsexuals themselves are the ones who compile their archives, research their history, and protect their heritage. What we must avoid is forced inclusion: we are not quotas.