Written by: Elliot Wolfgang Falkus
Contemporary social justice is posited on an inclusive intersectionality that tries to empathetically understand how our myriad identities, histories, and experiences interact. Socially-engaged heritage and museology is currently working towards balancing and democratising the content and experience of heritage spaces and the interpretation of the past and present that they convey. There are intersections of disabled and queer experience and heritage beyond shared marginality and discrimination. When we are constructing exhibitions and interpretation around disability and queerity, we come across similar challenges: of authenticity, of pathology and the decision to self-pathologise, of ephemera and burdens of proof, and the central, returning question: what is a queer object? What is a disabled object? I want to cover a few of the observations I’ve made on the intersections between practising queer and disabled heritage, and consider some ways in which these challenges can be collaboratively overcome.
Barriers to Entry
Being disabled and being queer are both marginalised, often protected statuses, due to a history - and present - of discrimination and disenfranchisement. In the context of heritage, this means that queer and disabled heritage has also been historically undervalued within heritage and museology - disability and queerity certainly are not part of the Authorised Heritage Discourse.(1) In addition, queer and disabled people face barriers to entering the sector and enacting their heritage in order to work towards democratising heritage. Underemployment of marginalised groups within the deeply competitive and academically rigorous museum industry means that it is more challenging to create an authentic presentation of queer and disabled heritage, systematically embedded within practice. More often than not ‘social’ heritage practitioners, working towards displaying and discussing their heritage, are relegated to underpaid or unpaid short term work, temporary, novel exhibitions, and community projects.
(1) This concept, coined by Professor Laurajane Smith in her 2006 book Uses of Heritage summarises the way dominant conceptions of ‘heritage’ prioritise a Western-focussed, ‘top-down’ approach, naturalised within our institutions and public policies to the detriment of intangible and minority heritages
Pathological Legacies
One of the most significant challenges queering scholars face is a fundamental lack of traditional, tangible evidence of a queer past. Of course we know why this is; the homogenising and flattening effect of European colonialism has both enforced historical heteronormativity and punished those queer people and communities that did persist despite. As Dr Christine Burns points out in the introduction to Trans Britain, ‘the idea of gender being strictly binary… seems to be a peculiar exception that grew up in Western Christian culture in the last two thousand years’ (Burns 2018, 8); queer history has existed since antiquity. However, under an assumed and unyielding sexual dimorphism and ‘a love that dared not speak its name’, queer heritage is encoded in secret languages, associative heritages, and legal and medical history. Similarly, traditional objects of disabled history are medical; diagnostic tools, medicines, and mobility aids. Even whole and portioned human remains count as disability heritage. The focus is often centred on the medical professionals who developed cures and identified diseases and never on the bearers of that disability, even if we are looking directly at a deceased disabled person’s body parts in a jar. (This is a whole other can of worms around human remains display, medical collections, and the anonymity required of the Human Tissues Act in the UK). However, if we are working to display an inclusive and comprehensive history of marginalised identity, there is no way to put on an exhibition about gay history without discussing the AIDS crisis, nor to mention trans history without covering Magnus Hirschfeld’s efforts to diagnose and identify transness in a medical setting (and the associated ethical iffiness and targeted destruction by Nazi officials). Neither can we exist as The Lyme Museum without talking about Lyme disease. The question then is, when we construct a disabled heritage, especially a heritage of invisible disability, how much of the objects and experiences we display should be reflective of our suffering? How much should we pathologise ourselves and each other? How do we display disabled and queer resistance in a productive, positive way?
Mundanity
Following on from this and expanding from our collection; The Lyme Museum’s contents as a reflection of lived disabled experience is inescapably mundane. This is not a negative thing at all. As beautifully written by Robyn Timmins, the mundanity of the objects in The Lyme Museum and their subsequent relatability, grant these objects museological power:
‘Visitors to The Lyme Museum will most likely have come across many of the objects in my flat lay image and may even have used them. The material is familiar. My experiences may not be. But through the material, tangible, object, my personal experiences and invisible disabilities are given a vehicle through which they are seen, considered, and understood.’ (Timmins 2024)
Ordinary objects connect visitors to donors, collections, and concepts.
I have felt this myself. For me, the most powerful object in the Pitt Rivers’ Beyond the Binary exhibition was an exceedingly ordinary letter from a Gender Identity Clinic to a donor. But I recognised the paperstock and structure and words of this letter - it was one I had also received. I and my trans experience were seen in a heritage context in a way I had not expected or experienced before.
But the mundanity of objects does have its challenges. I refer to this as the gay teapot problem - a teapot owned by a historically significant gay person will be identical to a teapot owned by a historically significant straight person; objects of queer history rely on queer associations. Objects ‘have no intrinsic sexuality – however, it is probably fair to say that their users will generally be assumed to have been heterosexual’, (Levin 2010, 164) as is the nature of living in a hetronormative world. Queer and disabled heritage, is mundane, ephemeral, and reliant upon associative heritage.
Take this image of a badge for instance:
This badge would rightly be associated with the queer and the disabled, but not through the practicalities of the object itself but for the symbolic associations of the rainbow flag (Baker) and the universal access symbol. (Hendren 2016) Rainbows are queer and wheelchairs are disabled - badges are intrinsically neither.
When researching queer social history representation in 2000, Angela Vanegas found that:
‘A few curators replied that they had material that could possibly be interpreted as lesbian and gay, and then mentioned items such as body-piercing jewellery or AIDS ephemera. The underlying message seemed to be that, because lesbians and gay men are defined by their sexuality, they can only be represented by objects relating to sex, an approach that denies other aspects of gay and lesbian culture.’ (Levin 2010, 164)
Essentially, straight or abled bodied curators don’t know, and wouldn’t know, what they’re doing and may end up doing far more harm than good in their presentation of a lived experience that they do not possess.
This then also connects back to the issues of disability represented through medical objects, that disabled experience is only characterised by disability in the impersonal abstract, rather than an approach that pays more heed to the social model of disability.
Burden of proof
Disabled is a dirty word - especially in the eyes of traditionalism. Disability is shameful and embarrassing, something to be either overcome or ignored. One can only recall early last year when the University of Leicester and the National Trust’s film Everywhere and Nowhere (University of Leicester 2023), garnered tabloid reactions of indignation and horror for correctly identifying English monarch King Henry VIII as disabled. Similarly, posthumous queering of historical figures is greatly offensive to those who assume the ‘normal’ human experience must be abled, heterosexual, and cisgender, and are aghast at any suggestion of a lineage of human sexual diversity. Being queer and being disabled carries an assumption of modernity. Critical historians and heritage practitioners attempting to uncover queer and disabled lives and experiences within the past are tasked with creating an overwhelming barrage of ‘traditional’ evidence to counter narratives of homogeny and hegemony in the Authorised Heritage Discourse. There is an enormous burden of proof required of us when we apply invisible marginalised identities to historical figures and communities.
Of course, there are relevant ethical quandaries around the queering/diagnosing of people from the past. In ‘What is ‘trans history’, anyway?' (Hickman 2021, 5), Rebecca Hickman identifies three distinct schools of thought as to the beginnings of trans history, each requiring differing levels of applying ‘modern’ terminology and concepts to the past:
The Medical school which locates trans history as originating with the development of sexology.
The Feinberg school ‘which views trans history as extending into antiquity’.
The Insectional school moves away from defining a trans studies/history origin point and why trans took over as the dominant mode of understanding gender-nonconformity.
I consider myself an acolyte of Leslie Feinberg so I am biased towards their perspective in Transgender Warriors in creating a trans lineage throughout time and culture. Notwithstanding the difficulties of extracting historical ‘evidence’ for any individual’s lived experiences, there is still an expectation of traditional historiography when we apply identity politics retrospectively, a burden of proof that is often impossible to surpass.
Regardless, disabled and queer people and communities did exist in the past - they may not be easily identifiable by those not versed in the languages of queer and disabled communities, and therefore representation at the curatorial level is non-negotiable in practising minority heritage.
The Liminal and the Invisible
The crux of The Lyme Museum is that not all disabilities are visible. Similarly, queerity is an experience, a way of relating to others, it is intangible and invisible. Other nexuses of underrepresented or marginalised identities and their associative heritages are tangible and obvious, for example working-class identities (though, in the UK, this model of the working class is primarily encapsulated by the white man) are represented in the storytelling around industrial and post-industrial landscapes and places. Of the 29 Cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the UK, eight are directly associated with the Industrial Revolution and the development of factory and mining processes. (UNESCO)
Again we return to the question, what represents disabled heritage? What represents queer heritage? The liminality and invisibility inherent to queer and disabled existence, so then how do we decide on which objects, people, places, and traditions, to encapsulate our shared experience and pay honour to the past, for the purposes of the present and future.
This is only a preliminary mediation and overview of some of the common themes I have observed whilst navigating and studying the heritage and museum sector in the UK as an invisibly disabled queer person. As always, to be in community is both the answer and goal as we work towards a wholly representational heritage of forgotten histories.
As a final note:
How to do heritage in the spirit of The Lyme Museum:
Find an object, person, place etc that connects to your lived experience through time/space. It doesn’t have to be historical, it doesn’t have to be special.
Share it.
Here’s mine; my copy of Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. Feinberg died from complications from Lyme disease in 2014 but in reading and annotating their work I can be in conversation with them, situating myself within a queer and disabled lineage.
Works Cited
Baker, Gilbert, ‘Rainbow Flag: Origin Story’, Gilbert Baker Foundation, n.d. <https://gilbertbaker.com/rainbow-flag-origin-story/>
Burns, Christine, Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows (Unbound, 2018)
Gender, Sexuality and Museums, ed. by Amy K. Levin (Routledge, 2010), doi:10.4324/9780203847770
Hendren, Sara, ‘An Icon is a Verb: About the Project’, The Accessible Icon Project, February 2016 <https://accessibleicon.org/#an-icon-is-a-verb>
Hickman, Rebecca, ‘What is 'trans history', anyway?: Historiographical theory and practice in a flourishing field’, Midlands Historical Review, 5 (2021) <https://midlandshistoricalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/What-is-‘trans-history-anyway_.pdf>
Timmins, Robyn, ‘Invisible disabilities, lived experiences, and the mundane object’, The Lyme Museum, 17 May 2024 <https://www.thelymemuseum.org/post/invisible-disabilities-lived-experiences-and-the-mundane-object>
UNESCO, ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, UNESCO World Heritage Convention - State Parties, n.d. <https://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/gb>
University of Leicester, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’, YouTube, 16 January 2023 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4usqhQx7oh8>
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