thoughts on Queer Possibilities in the Museum
On a Sunday evening in November I went to the Ulster Museum for an Outburst Queer Arts Festival event, Queer Possibility in the Museum. This was developed collaboratively by Outburst and quarto friend and colleague Margaret Middleton, a museum designer, with the support of Ulster Museum staff.
The museum was being kept open beyond its usual hours, into the evening. I navigated through the flow of families leaving, and registered for the event. Thereafter, I was free to wander the museum, using Margaret’s beautifully written and designed booklet guide, Looking for Queer Possibility in the Museum. The self-directed journey was punctuated by commissioned performances by queer artists. A café-style space with materials to facilitate conversation ran throughout the evening in the museum foyer, overseen by Split Britches, a performance duo offering their perspectives as ‘queer elders’.
I moved through the floors, enjoying the quiet and the dark, lingering where I wanted to, relishing the absence of my impatient children. Margaret’s booklet is wonderfully simple, accessible and exploratory, and opened my mind to interpretations of words and images I had not considered before. They point out that in labelling, terms like ‘lifelong spinster’, ‘loner’, ‘close companion’ can be euphemisms for queerness and queer relationships. In terms of symbols and themes in collections or other material, they note that pansies or violets, sailors, sex workers, witches, Saint Sebastian or the Graeco-Roman goddess Artemis/Diana ‘may indicate either a queer creator, a queer subject or a queer collector’.[1] Margaret emphasised the value of the queer person’s subjective knowledge, born of experience. They offered their own while making plenty of space for the user’s too.
I don’t have the intuitions that are born of living as a queer person in an environment largely shaped by and for straight people. But on my wander, Margaret’s suggestions made me look differently and look more closely. I was drawn to exhibits on Ireland’s 20th-century struggle for independence, knowing I had seen material relating to Roger Casement there in previous years. I was disappointed to find him absent.
I drifted from History to Natural History, then, pausing in front of the dazzling butterfly display and thinking again about Casement. I made some work about him in 2016, and know a little of his life history. He occupied a painful, occasionally productive, but ultimately fatal place at the intersection of several identities: agent of the British Empire, humanitarian campaigner, fighter for Irish independence, necessarily closeted gay man and collector. His queerness was not only used against him in his trial for treason against the British state (via references to the discovery of diaries detailing his sexual encounters with men) but compromised his status as a national martyr in the independent Irish state.[2] Butterflies he captured, preserved and brought home from Colombia were displayed at the National Museum of Ireland to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his execution. In the same year, 2016, I saw a performance in Belfast of choreographer and dancer Fearghus Ó Conchúir’s Butterflies and Bones, a portrait of and reflection on Casement’s life and work through moving bodies. The Ulster Museum’s butterflies are not Casement’s. But through association they mitigated his absence and made him something of a queer presence for me that night.
The performances offered further food for thought. In the Early Peoples exhibit, poet Maoilíosa Nic Éadaoin mused on how they, as a queer person, might have been received in earlier times. Alluding to periods of mental ill-health arising from the rigours of owning and living out their queer identity in a heteronormative patriarchy, they wondered whether psychosis and self-harm might have lifted them into the realm of mystic, or even saint. In the Fashion exhibit, drag king Carl Hartt gave a ‘boylesque’ performance, stripping off an elaborate suit, piece by piece, to the soundtrack of ‘Creep’ by Radiohead. Finally, back in the foyer, Ross Doherty-Anderson both riffed on and enacted taking up space as a self-described ‘fat’ queer person, dressed in angel wings and white net. Giving their versions of Annie Lennox, Indigo Girls and Rihanna songs, they exhorted the audience to use their own voices and move their own bodies joyfully and freely too.
These performances spoke very directly and compassionately to queer experience, but went beyond, too. I feel that they spoke to anyone, queer or straight, with experience of being female, mentally unwell, or in a bigger body. Though a straight cis woman, I could see reflections of myself. Some of the pain of queerness, of not fitting in, for me was translated here into both a refusal of control or exclusion, and a generous celebration, of diverse bodies and minds. Asserting wellness and wholeness and beauty in bigger bodies, especially, is a courageous and necessary and powerful correction to the idea that thin bodies, and taut bodies, are the only healthy bodies and the only attractive bodies. This idea is increasingly sinister, not least because of the way in which wellness and fascist narratives can be made to overlap.
I went away moved, and grateful.
[1] Margaret Middleton, looking for Queer Possibility in the Museum: a guide to help you make queer connections in museums and record your queer experience, produced in collaboration with Outburst Arts, 2022. Available to download at https://www.margaretmiddleton.com/resources.
[2] Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement: the Black Diaries (with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life), Belfast, Belfast Press, 2002.