Call for Papers | Gender and sexuality in museum collections exhibitions (deadline: 31 March)

While the history of the LGBTQIA (Lesbienne-Bi-Trans-Queer-Intersex-Asexual-Asexual-Asexual-Asexual) communities is included in sections of board museums, there are few that are devoted exclusively to them, such as the Schwules Museum in Berlin (1985), the Unstraight Museum in Stockholm (2011), the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco (2011). In the more particular field of art, specialized agencies are under international development (the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York acquired museum status in 2011, and QUEERCIRCLE opened in June 2022 in London), but hardly exist in France. While many museums and French scientific projects (the Summer University of the Kandinsky Library “Drederate” the museum and its sources: the queerness in the or the research project Queering the Exhibition – Queering the Archive conducted at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges) have begun reflections on gender and sexual relations in artistic creation, there are only rare practices on the field. As LGBTQIA people are a minority facing structural discrimination, this project seeks to understand the role that museum collection exhibitions around the world play in representing society and marginalized groups.

This issue uses the concept of “gender,” but also “queer,” as tools for analyzing gender norms and sexuality, in the verbal sense of “queering” to capture strategies and devices presenting objects in a way that challenges heteronormative discourse irrigating the institutional narrative. If the art historian Patrik Steorn claims, in an article translated for the number 30 of Culture and Museums dedicated to the Museums with the prism of the genre in 2017 (under the direction of Charlotte Foucher-Carmanian and Arnaud Bertinet), that applying the concept of queer to the museum is an oxymoron, in that it escapes all that is enclosing everything that is attached to it and everything that has the power to be. However, the museum could serve as a space for change of society (Sanders III, 2007), through work on exposed biographical data and artistic practices (some of them such as performance and textile practices have been historically appropriate by marginalized groups), as well as work to develop conservation practices, such as the development of artists’ sexuality and the use of queer as an analytical tool (Barendreg, 2017). Thus, the theme of issue No. 45 of the Journal of Museum Education of 2020 focuses on the educational function of the museum and the work of its mediators in the US context: “Quereizing” the museum would be much more than discussing LGBTQIA stories and would aim to deconstruct the standards that govern visibility and inclusion (Prottas, 2020). In the same year, Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton invited people to move away from traditional museology through an open and located process that, in expography, knowledge production and public engagement, provides an understanding of objects preserved as tools to depart from assigned standards (Middleton and Sullivan, 2020). This issue thus seeks to understand how the mechanisms for mediation and valorizing collections that can be described as “quer”, that is to say, that is to say, that criticize relations of gender and sexuality, modify the discourse present within the exhibitions of museum collections.

Proposals may be submitted to Quentin Petit Dit Duhal, Director of this issue until 31 March at the following address: quentinpetitdd-hotmail.fr. These texts will take the form of a summary of up to 3 000 signs, containing a title – even provisional – and a specific issue. Proposals may be sent in French or English (translation is possible if the finalised texts are accepted).

In the event of a positive opinion (circumvention April 2025), the author will undertake to submit its fully drafted article (maximum 30,000 signs, including spaces and notes) by ensuring that the magazine’s standards are complied with by 30 June 2025.

Once received, the text will be anonymous and submitted to a double-blind assessment by the members of the drafting committee and the external experts who form the peer-reviewed committee specific to each issue. At the end of the evaluation process, the author will receive the reasoned opinions of its two proofreaders, as well as that of the director of the number. Its text may be accepted, subject to minor or major corrections, or refused.