D_08 Representation in Public Space: Inclusive and Diversity-Oriented Memory Culture in Museums

Sections:: Berlin
Disciplines:: History , Cultural Studies , Literature Studies
Belongs to:: Dynamics of hegemony (D: Cultural Dynamics of Cohesion)

Abstract

Diversity of memories—memory of diversity: queer in the museum! This work package examines the role of museums in fostering social cohesion. In particular, it asks how museums, and practices within and through museums, can succeed in integrating social diversity into the grand narratives through which societies understand themselves.

Over the past decade, queer life stories have increasingly become a topic within established museums. In addition, new institutions have emerged, such as Queer Britain in London. This work package takes these developments as its point of departure and asks how lesbian, gay, trans, and more broadly queer individuals and histories find their place within museums.

Museums are being regarded as institutions that enjoy a high degree of public trust. They are seen as enduring institutions that preserve, research, and display the past of society as a whole, and that are in principle accessible to everyone. What enters a museum—whether as an object or as a (life) story—is understood as part of a shared cultural heritage; it belongs. What does it therefore mean when museums increasingly engage with queer lives and histories? Does this reflect a changed societal relationship to ways of life that were previously perceived as marginal or excluded? And how does integrating queer perspectives shape visitors’ perceptions?

The aim of the work package is to provide a comparative European stocktaking. It examines selected museums and projects in different cities against the backdrop of their respective political debates and societal developments. The analysis focuses on the motivations of collectors and curators, on modes of representation, and not least on cooperation with communities and initiatives, visitor responses, and possibilities for participation.

Transfer Activities

We develop our catalogue of questions in collaboration with practice partners. Public panels with museum staff and members of queer communities invite to “on-site” debates.

This work package (WP) explores the cultural dynamics of hegemony and counter-hegemonic practices by examining struggles over the representation of marginalized queer biographies within the museum as a site of memory culture. It investigates the reciprocal relationship between museological representation and societal debates about identity. The WP assumes that museums both reflect debates about social cohesion and actively shape them. In comparative perspective, it examines how formerly marginalized biographies and queer perspectives can be integrated into master narratives of social cohesion, where the limits of canonization lie, and whether and how master narratives can be transformed.

Museums are sites of shared memory and mirrors of the nationally sanctioned “we.” At the same time, they are actors in processes of cohesion and media of valorization, insofar as they endow exhibited cultural assets with representative status and thus with belonging to a shared cultural heritage. Although access to museums in Germany is often socially selective and linked to structures of inequality, museums nonetheless play a central role in the formation of cultural canons. At the same time, museums—especially in international perspective—are institutions undergoing profound transformation. Their self-understanding is shifting from that of representative public institutions toward agents of democracy and human rights. Particularly in the Global South, museums have established themselves as forums that support marginalized identities. In contrast, the German discourse on the museum as a “third place,” despite an increased sensitivity to diversity, remains less oriented toward participation. These frictions are reflected in the current debates within the International Council of Museums over a new definition of museums as institutions of active inclusion.

In contemporary discussions of culture as a factor of social cohesion, museums occupy a particularly significant role, as they are part of the representative public sphere and enjoy high credibility in the mediation of history. Recent studies emphasize the potential of museums to foster trust in cultural institutions more broadly. This WP seeks to expand debates about the trust capital of museums and the societal significance of museum work by foregrounding queer perspectives that have not yet been hegemonic. Drawing on critical museum studies, it addresses the “politics and poetics of display” and turns to the still underexplored question of how museums, through biographical work, help shape discourses about the collective “we.”

The fact that the German Bundestag has addressed queer life designs on Holocaust Remembrance Day and displayed them within its own premises is indicative of an increasingly diversity-sensitive culture of remembrance in German society, and at the same time the result of long-term biographical work in research and museums. The federal action plan for greater acceptance of gender diversity highlights a distinction between historical and contemporary biographies. Engaging with historical biographies can contribute, within a museological framework, to the acceptance of diversity as a form of experiential memory politics. By contrast, the representation of living queer individuals in museums has so far not become a standard element of hegemonic cultural policy, nor has the museum been fully established as a space in which social frictions can be addressed within a protected environment. The concept of hegemony, understood as a transversal analytical category, is particularly suited to making previously marginalized groups more visible in sociohistorical terms.

The WP asks which formerly marginalized groups have entered the canon of museum representation over the past ten years. Building on current research projects, it examines contemporary debates about belonging and exclusion in the museum field. The focus lies on queer (group) biographies, life designs, and narratives that have gained cultural prominence in recent years—whether as part of national history museums or as emblematic markers of a “modern” society.

The WP also critically examines who brings these topics into the space of representation and how exhibitions in state-run museums are perceived in comparison to queer initiatives, queer spaces, and newly founded institutions, since hegemony is also expressed through access to cultural arenas of representation. In doing so, the research seeks to identify the characteristics of a culture of representation that resists ressentiment and that becomes visible in innovative museum projects and (re)conceptualizations.