The Intimacy and Chaos of Decategorizing
An art museum-queer women connection intervention
Introduction
This interdisciplinary, practice-based project investigates the role of de-categorisation in the formation of intimacy and belonging, examining how deterministic and dualistic frameworks of categorisation underpin art museums, and the struggles and conflicts causing due to the influence of poststructuralism and feminism, and aims to achieve a de-/categorisation balance to increase queer women’s inclusivity.
Decategorizing as a key component of queer women’s intimacy, I will examine how it could be situated, integrated, and innovated in the art museum field by: space (exhibition space, extended community of practice space, administration), people (different genders, ethnicities, cultures), and narratives (personal narratives, queer community narratives, local community space narratives, museum exhibit narratives). Analysing their individual and mutual differences and intersectionality, intercultural common ground is sought, which involves negotiating boundaries between (and within) different spaces, communities, identities, and narratives. In this way, the complexity of intimacy is crystallised. This subverts existing orders and classifications, leads to the disruption of multiple boundaries and the opening up of multiple new spaces of dialogue to generate new opportunities and knowledge. This research is a continuation and extension of my interdisciplinary queer community project.
Research Background
The traditional museum's patriarchal values and binary gender structure have led it to be ‘(un)intentionally served as an instrument of heteronormativity’ (Sanders, 2008). Fortunately, the birth of the new museology has promoted ideas related to diversity and inclusion (Macdonald, 2006). However, as Nguyen (2017) stated female groups and sexual minorities still play a passive role in the field. Under the feminism political climate, contemporary museums have had to respond to the growing voices of equality. However, Dimitrakaki and Perry (2015) express their concern of ‘whether feminism and museums have become victim to a consumerist market’. Museums and feminism ‘seem to be at odds with one another simply due to the nature of each' (Ashton, 2018) — the former is based on rigidly compartmentalised categories, while the latter promotes openness and interconnectedness.
Situated in this conflict, this study builds on third wave feminism practices and queer theory, which emphasises transgression, to disrupt feminist essentialism and binary thinking and break the deadlock. As an offshoot of post-structuralism, queer theory advocates for the deconstruction and abolish definitive categorisation of queer groups (Butler, 2011), and the insertion of LGBTQ into the 'umbrella theme’ (Butler, 2004) to integrate difference. Through the scope of it, the research is able to re-examine and critique the museum's conventionalised categorical structures and heteronomative logic, allowing for an essential shift towards fluidity and a process of diversity and inclusion.
I draw on my own identity as a queer woman, my queer community project building, my experience of working in museums, and my knowledge of contemporary art to explore the individualistic and collectivist inherent tension of the queer woman, seeking the intersectionality of this to reveal how a decategorised approach can increase their intimacy towards space, content and community, within the art museum field. Art often carries the political power of concepts about sexuality and gender, and it tends to change 'hearts and minds’ (Altman, 2013). The contact between object and subject through the medium of art stimulates more imagination and is closely linked to the emotional and sensual dimensions of experience (Bachelard, 1964). By limiting the scope to gender study, the topological approach will be able to reveal differences in spatial understanding and information reception caused by sexual and gender differences.
Research Questions
1
How to create intimacy for queer women in the art museum field through de-categorising the space (exhibition space, extended community of practice space, administration), people (different genders, races, cultures), narratives (personal narratives, queer community narratives, local community space narratives, museum exhibit narratives)? How does this intimacy contribute to the inclusivity of art museums?
2
How can an understanding of this intimacy and the ways in which it breaks down certainty reveal the creation and operation of difference? How can the conflict between art museums and feminism be ameliorated? Constructing a possible post-patriarchal system?
3
Revealing the entangled complexities of intimacy, chaos and de-classification, how art museums and queer community connection practices complicate the structuralist binary: individual/collective, authoritative/marginal, difference/common, visible/invisible, immaterial/material?
Methodology
Through community workshops, art exhibition spatial interventions and online magazine platforms, a flexible and responsive art queer community practice will be established. In order to understand how the current tension has developed, I will trace the history of the relationship between London art museums and queer women. Through analysing the quantitative questionnaires collected following the spatial interventions, I will be able to receive feedback from my target audiences across different communities. And experimenting with monthly journal content will result in changing magazine traffic and subscription numbers. Finally, the long-term follow-up interviews with museum staff and queer women in the community will enable me to dive into the topic from personal experiences.
Queer feminism, ontology, ethnography, topology, new-museology, cultural geography and actor network are the main theories used to analyse the data and to adapt the ongoing design of the practice.
I will break down and quantify intimacy into several indicator questions as a measure of the success of the research questions. In addition to this, I expect to answer my research questions by analysing data including community size and stickiness, magazine readership numbers and subscriptions rate, questionnaire satisfaction level, museum partner influence and long-term feedback from interviews.
To do this, I needed to identify the proper long-term art museum partners that would allow for community empowerment and in-house exhibition design. In addition to this, I needed to identify suitable collaborators including graphic designers, journalists, interaction designers - for the digital magazine communication platform.
Bibliography
Altman, D. (2013) The end of the homosexual? University of Queensland.
Ashton, J. C. (ed.) (2018) Feminism and museums: Intervention, disruption and change. Volume 2. Museumsetc.
Bachelard, G. (1964) The poetics of space. Translated by M. Jolas. Viking Books.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender. London, England: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2011) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London, England: Routledge.
Dimitrakaki, A. and Perry, L. (eds.) (2015) Politics in a glass case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press.
Lloyd, M. (2013) Judith butler: From norms to politics. 1st ed. Oxford, England: Polity Press.
Macdonald, S 2006, Companion to Museum Studies. Companions in Cultural Studies, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Malden, USA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, Canada.
Nguyen, T. (2017) Queering Australian Museums: Management, Collections, Exhibitions, and Connections. The University of Sydney. Available at: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/18169.
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Sanders, J., 2008. The Museum's Silent Sexual Performance. Museums & Social Issues, 3(1), pp.15-28.