IS QUEER ENOUGH? THOUGHTS ON QUEER MUSEUMS

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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In his 2008 article Theorizing the Queer Museum, Robert Mills talks about the difficulties that would surround a queer museum. For the purposes of this article, queer is used here to refer to a wide variety of sexual and gender identities, like gay, lesbian, transgender, and more. Mills' main point is that queer theory is inherently antithetical to museums, as museums are normalizing while queer identities are intrinsically non-normative. Mills, quoting Kosofksy Sedgwick, says that history reflects the heteronormative ideals of “inheritance, marriage, dynasty, domesticity, and population” and that queer exhibitions challenge these tenants. These qualities help to erase queer identities, it is claimed, so presenting anything remotely queer can be seen as radical.

Democratic Candidate Pete Buttigieg, seen here being intrinsically non-normative. Source.

I disagree with this though. I do not believe that there is anything intrinsically non-normative about queer identities; it instead comes out of how one expresses their queerness. Referring back to the quote above, I find it laughable that queerness cannot fit into those descriptors that the author calls “history”. Marriage is the one that should stand out to anyone with even the briefest familiarity with queer history from the last 30 years. Marriage has been at the heart of the queer movement for decades now. Meanwhile, the idea of the “traditional family” (upon which marriage is the central pillar) has been used as a bludgeon by right wing ideologues to attack and demonize queer relationships. In an effort to get gay marriage recognized, queer activists had to shape queer love into something it was not; straight-passing. It had to abandon the BDSM, the kinks, the casual sex, the polyamory; to be accepted, queer love had to become palatable to straight observers, all over forms of love be damned. There is a term for this, where the heterosexual features of queer relationships are highlighted above all else; it is called homonormativity. This is why I do not agree with Mills’ claims on the antagonistic nature between queer and museums; queer can be just as normative.

A humourous representation of homonormativity in media. Source.

While I disagree with how Mills gets to his conclusion, I would agree with that queer museums cannot succeed, or at the very least are very difficult to create. We have this idea that LGBT+ history was a coming together of outcasts that finally fought for their rights. This really is not the whole story, and the phrase “a trans woman of colour threw the first brick at Stonewall” does not help this. Queer history is one of strange bedfellows, groups that could barely stand each other, trying to get along to advance their goals. Showing the intricacies of these groups that very rarely actually got along would prove to be a great challenge to any museum, especially when the dominant voices will disregard any wrongdoing. One of my favourite examples to highlight this is with Lesbian Organization of Toronto, or LOOT for short. From 1976 to 1980, LOOT claimed that every lesbian in Toronto was automatically a member. Because of this, they very rarely agreed on anything. One of the few times they were in agreement, however, was to not allow a transgender woman to attend their meetings. Theoretical differences in identity such as these make it incredibly difficult for a queer museum to just exist. Existential questions must be asked because queer is not enough. A queer museum must also be a trans museum. It must be an intersex museum. It must be asexual. It must represent every letter under the LGBT umbrella. Without those other identities, only the dominant voices get to have a say in how to present history.

WHY WE NEED A TRANSGENDER MUSEUM STUDIES

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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Transgender voices have grown louder and more prominent in recent years, but in the museum field, they still frequently lag behind. While there have been some fantastic efforts made in the past year, such as the series of guides that the American Alliance of Museums' Task Force for Transgender Inclusion has produced on transitioning in the museum field, but these have usually focused upon hiring practices and employees within the museum. The systems that propagate oppression continue to go unchecked. It is for this reason that I believe it is imperative that we develop a transgender museum studies; to bring attention to the unseen heteronormative practices that run rampant in museums.

Photograph courtesy of Joanna Wreakes.

Central to a transgender museum studies is the theory that transfeminist author Julia Serano calls “ungendering.” In her book Whipping Girl, Serano describes ungendering as a “phenomenon […] where gender-variant people are used as a device to bring conventional notions about maleness and femaleness into question.” Through ungendering, transgender voices are erased, because the focus is no longer upon their experiences, but on what can be understood about cisgender society through trans people.

We do not need to go very far to see the effects of ungendering in the museum field. At the end of last year on the fifth floor of Bissell Building, there was a small exhibition on transgender pornography. I previously wrote about a review of it while it was on, but using Serano’s framework provides an excellent opportunity for deeper analysis.

Transgender pornography and sex work are very prominent for trans people, so it would make sense to have an exhibition on the topic. The exhibition used materials such as photocopied zines, crossdressing BDSM pulp fiction, and DVD and VHS cases of trans porn. There was very little didactic panels that offered any kind of interpretation of the materials on display. These sections felt very disconnected from one another.

The vitrine from the exhibition, containing transgender porn VHS's. The lack of didactics prevents conversations to develop about the lasting impact that comes with fetishizing transgender women. Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

What was missing most was trans voices. Transgender fetishism is an incredibly common phenomenon in trans circles, but nowhere was there any kind of discussion about the lingering effects of trans porn in the community. There are so many discussions that could be brought up by an exhibition on trans porn that were missed in this exhibit. Why do trans people so frequently go into sex work? Why are trans people so often associated with sex work? How does trans pornography help trans people explore their identity? What kind of effects does the representation of trans people as sex workers have on those looking to see themselves in media? All of these questions came to me when thinking about the exhibition, but the exhibition was not concerned with the trans experience  in regards to trans pornography. The voices of the trans sex workers or those that have to deal with the fetishization are erase.

If we want museums and exhibitions to appeal to wider audiences, we must not rely on assumptions about minority groups. For members of those minority groups, it is painfully obvious when their voices are not present. Julia Serano’s framework is just one way that we can learn to do better.  We can be better, and if we want to tell more vibrant stories through exhibitions, we have to be.

THE T IS NOT SILENT

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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The Friday before the Pride Parade, Church Street is packed. At around 8 PM, the crowd makes its way up to Bloor Street before turning down Yonge Street and continuing to Allan Gardens. This march evokes a very different atmosphere than the festivities that are scheduled for this Sunday. There is no need for the corporate sponsors, just thousands of people walking in solidarity. This is the Transgender March, my personal highlight of Pride every year.

The banner carried at the front of the Trans March. Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

This is the tenth year that Toronto had a Trans March to kick off Pride weekend. Starting as an unofficial event, the March has grown in size every year, with this year’s estimates sitting around 8,000 people. The energy was palpable and a farcry from the Pride Parade on Sunday. There were no banks with larger than life floats, no corporations trying to hock their wares on a public. Instead, there were thousands of people, all united in the same cause. They carried signs that conveyed a shared trans cultural production. They used memes and made references to things recognizable within online trans spaces, such as the now legendary 57 hour livestream of the 1999 game Donkey Kong 64 by Youtuber Hbomberguy that raised $340,000 for a trans charity earlier this year. Examples can be seen below.

VERY GOOD signs from the Trans March on Friday night!!!! Absolutely thrilled to see so many friends and people come out to march!!! LOVE YOU 💙💖⚪️💖💙 pic.twitter.com/Ngbpez2Tzq

— 💖 Gremlin Sherry 💖 (@rancidyogurt) June 23, 2019

Events such as the Trans March are incredibly important, both for individuals and for understanding Pride. Growing up transgender, no one ever spoke about trans people, and even more infrequently was actually seeing someone who was trans. It felt isolating. This contrasts to the Trans March, where I am surrounded by people being visible. These people are not just speaking about trans people but advocating for trans rights, which is incredibly powerful. Events like these signal to other closeted individuals that they are not alone.


Equally important is how it is viewed within Pride itself, for Pride and the Gay Rights Movement has a long history of transphobia. It is often said that the first Pride was a riot, but rarely is it mentioned that the second Pride in San Francisco excluded drag queens from attending. Even here in Toronto, Pride organizers tried to sabotage the Trans March for many years by restricting it to a much shorter route than those offered to the Dyke March or the Parade. By having the Trans March each and every year, it represents a resilience amongst the community and, with the March swelling in size every year, a stark reminder that trans issues are no longer on the periphery but now in the mainstream. The Trans March serves as encouragement for the future.

AFTER THE SECOND MOLOTOV: UNRAVELING STONEWALL'S HERITAGE

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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“A transgender woman of colour threw the first brick at Stonewall.” This is a phrase that frequently gets used to place trans people within the LGBT. Often, it is referring to Sylvia Rivera, a trans Latinx sex worker. While she was alive, Rivera rejected the claims, instead stating that she threw “the second Molotov.” Nevertheless, the claim she threw the first brick has had a monumental effect on how Stonewall is remembered and beyond.

For those that might not be aware, the Stonewall Inn was a meeting place for the LGBT community in New York during the 1960s. Because of this, it was often the target of police raids. The constant police harassment would culminate in the early hours on June 28, 1969. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn responded violently, kicking off a riot that would go down in history as starting the Gay Liberation Movement and the modern LGBT.

The legendary Stonewall Inn. Source

Soon after the riots on New York’s Christopher Street, gay rights activist groups began sprouting all over the world. Stonewall had been the spark that ignited a revolution, one based in the methods of the preceding Civil Rights Movement. The following years would see significant gains made by gay activists. But, this is where transgender history and gay history deviate.

Sylvia Rivera was in the Gay Liberation Movement from the start, having even been at Stonewall on the first day of the riots. But she would not stay long. The gay communities were changing, and changing in such a way that left very little room for trans people. The gay male culture was becoming hypermasculine, finding itself in gay clubs and through hard drugs. Meanwhile, the lesbian sphere was getting involved with Second Wave Feminism, typified by its exclusion of transgender individuals.

Gay communities were becoming hostile to trans people, and this shows in the 1971 Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York. Through backroom dealings, the language of the act was changed so as to remove all reference to gender expression in an effort to make it more palatable at the expense of trans individuals. This angered many trans activists, including Rivera, as it seemed like they had been betrayed.

Rivera would leave gay activism a couple years later. The rise of trans exclusionary rhetoric reached a peak at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, when feminists in the crowd described the trans women present as mocking womanhood. In response, Rivera got on stage, amid boos from the crowd, to decry the inactivity of the gay activists. Her role in the movement would soon be forgotten, only to be rediscovered in the 1990s.



So, what does all this mean, then? To understand that, we need to delve into some theory, specifically Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Tony Bennett on narratives. In his essay “Museums and Progress,” Bennett describes narratives as only existing in retrospect, only having value once we give it value. In this way, narratives are entirely constructed and not inherent. This fits in well with Anderson’s Imagined Communities theory in which large groups that will never meet each other imagine a shared comradery.

These theories reflect how Stonewall is viewed in the LGBT. Much like Anderson’s examples of South East Asian monuments, Stonewall became an image that represented LGBT activism. The LGBT has taken the image of Stonewall and mythologized it. No longer does it just represent a place but a whole group and a mentality that can be seen and felt around the world. With the rediscovered involvement of trans activists like Rivera, the narrative that surrounds Stonewall and the LGBT has slowly shifted. No longer was it the start of just Gay Rights, but a larger LGBT community. It brought about more inclusion for trans individuals.

But this inclusion in the narrative problematizes transgender history. It creates an assumption that, since we were present at the start of the movement, gay and trans histories are one and the same. This results in a further erasure of trans history as it gets subsumed by the much larger and more vocal gay history.

TRANS PORNOGRAPHIES AND UNCHECKED FETISHIZATION

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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If you have been around the Faculty of Information lately, you may have noticed a small, recent exhibition on the fifth floor of the Inforum. This exhibition covers some aspects of transgender pornography in the later half of the 20th century. As a transgender museum professional that has been desperately trying to find a way to make those identities coexist, I was excited to see something that was relevant to my identity. At least, I was initially.

As I spent more time thinking about the exhibition, I started to feel more and more uncomfortable with the subject matter. The reason was simple: it did nothing to address the fetishization of trans bodies and instead unintentionally played into it.

To be clear, I am not claiming that trans porn is inherently a bad thing. For many trans individuals, sex work and pornography were the only way to make money and survive. Even the most revered trans activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were forced into sex work simply because of their identities. So, to act as though there is absolutely no place for this would be to ignore history.

The display case showing crossdressing fantasies on one side and real life trans experiences on the other.
Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

Where the problem arises, however, is in how the material is presented. With very few didactics, the exhibit demands the viewer to interpret the objects on display. No where is there a discussion on the outdated language and slurs that run rampant throughout the displays. Words such as "transexual" and "transvestite" have very nuanced histories that are completely lost on most audiences. A cisgender audience, of which the Faculty of Information predominantly is, would not be as familiar with these materials to question the underlying issues that arise from each of the displays.

The exhibit is split up into three sections, the wall, the display case and the vitrine. All of these cover different aspects and each have their own problems. The wall shows photocopies of the Gendertrash zine. The major problem with this section is that, quite simply, these are not pornographic, nor do they discuss trans bodies. They more closely discuss trans identities and the issues of being trans in a world that does not understand them. Simply put, the section is out of place in an exhibition on trans pornography. The only reason I can see it being included is because it was started by a sex worker, but again, there is no text panels to explain why it is there.

The wall covered with photocopies of the Gendertrash zine. The design makes this section fairly inaccessible.
 Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

The display case’s presentation is even more baffling. On one side is pulp erotic fiction detailing the forced feminization of men, and on the other is the real-life interviews with trans people. This is especially insulting considering one of the trans people on display was legendary film composer Wendy Carlos. The juxtaposition of crossdressing fetishism with real life trans icons waters down any kind of positive messages that could come from either.

The vitrine is probably the most noticeable of the three displays, containing within it the very explicit images of trans porn VHS tapes. These portray the fantasies of a largely cisgender audience, especially the transfemme ones. Fantasies such as these serve only to portray trans people as some kind of in between, a chance to experience gay sex without having to question one’s sexuality. But this underlying homophobia is never questioned, never addressed, because of the lack of panels discussing the exhibit.

The vitrine containing video trans porn. The use of slurs is most prevalent here.
Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

But the biggest problem in my mind with the exhibit is how it seems to portray the fetishism of trans bodies as being something of the past. Nothing seems to be from this millennium, which gives off a feeling of antiquity to these depictions. This fetishism is anything but antique. If anything, it has been bolstered with the internet. And it is a fact of life that every trans person that is even slightly public knows.

The realities of being openly trans online, an aspect of trans pornographies that this exhibit does not address. Photo courtesy of Amelia Smith.

The exhibit clearly wanted to educate people on the realities of trans porn, but it could have used a trans person to help give a trans voice.

WHERE'S THE T? TRANSGENDER INCLUSION IN THE MUSEUM

Not Your Average Cistory | Amelia Smith

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Last year, the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) released a draft document that attempted to address the issue of LGBTQ2+ inclusion within Canadian museums. Among the flaws of the document, one stands out from the rest, hitting at a deeper problem that runs throughout. In the section entitled “Self Identification,” the CMA seems to believe that simply including more diverse options in collecting data about employees will lead to more diverse results. Unfortunately though, there is a concept in the trans community called “being stealth.” Being stealth is when a trans person does not announce their identity, sometimes for safety reasons. If the work environment does not appear safe for the trans employee to come out, they will not announce their identity.

This gets to the root of the problem with the CMA’s inclusive policies; they deal with the top down, the hiring policies, the health benefits, data collection, but they ignore the culture that is already in place. There is very little that would let a museum know how they can help a trans employee directly.

A Transgender Pride flag flying on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Source.

In my conversations with trans museum professionals, one of the largest issues they faced was the emotional labour required to be open and out in the workplace. This is especially true for non-binary individuals, those whose identity goes beyond the traditional ‘male’ or ‘female’. For many trans people, it falls upon them to educate those around them about their identity and what it means to be trans. Being in an industry that is often contract based, a trans individual must begin the whole educating process anew with each new job. This on its own can feel like a whole other job on top of the one they were hired for. And that gets incredibly exhausting.

Another area that the CMA drops the ball on is with pronouns and how they discuss them. Everyone has a pronoun, but for most, it is just presumed based upon how they express themselves. In the CMA document, pronouns are only mentioned to say not to presume during the hiring process, when talking to the public, or when an employee needs to change their information. There are many more ways that pronouns can find their way into the workplace beyond these, and many can very easily be introduced to help a trans individual feel more welcome. One such suggestion is to normalize the idea of giving someone your pronouns. This should be done not only for trans employees, but for everyone so that it does not single out the trans employees. It can be as little as including your pronouns in your email signature, which is a practice that is becoming more and more common. This small act shows trans employees that you are thinking critically about the nature of pronouns. It can have a really big effect.

Buttons such as these can be very good to announce one’s pronouns to those around them. Source.

These are only a couple of the (many) issues with the CMA’s recent LGBTQ2+ inclusion document and ways that museums can try to be more inclusive of their employees. To find out the areas that an institution needs to improve upon, it would be best to talk to any trans employees the institution might have and listen to what they have to say. It is not enough to just assume what they need, adding their voice to the conversation is a must.