About QTM Online
to queer:
“…to put out of order, to make strange the taken-for-granted, the naturalised”.
Sullivan, 2003
Purpose
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- -> To unsettle the traditional relationships between museums, objects, people, communities and stories, and to disrupt the so-called
definitive answers and the systems of power and privilege they support.
- -> To unsettle the traditional relationships between museums, objects, people, communities and stories, and to disrupt the so-called
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- -> To demonstrate that objects have no inherent meaning, but become meaningful through their connections with people, places,
usage, ideas.
- -> To demonstrate that objects have no inherent meaning, but become meaningful through their connections with people, places,
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- -> To question what we think we know and how we know it.
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- -> To engage in the co-production of knowledge with our audiences, in particular those who may never have been asked to share
what they know or what they have experienced.
- -> To engage in the co-production of knowledge with our audiences, in particular those who may never have been asked to share
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- -> To share authority and to acknowledge the authority embedded in lived experience.
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- -> To promote creative engagement with our collections, beyond the walls of the museum.
- -> To give our collections new life.
Origin
The term ‘queering’ as a verb comes from a form of critique and activism developed and driven by LGBTQI+ scholars and communities. It is a way of
troubling what we have come to know as ‘common knowledge’. The term is no longer tethered only to LGBTQI+: it has become a useful tool for opening
up ideas about race, religion, class, dis/ability, normalcy, etc. This makes room for stories that have been largely absent from the giant story of human
endeavour throughout our world.