Queering museum heritage

Heritage institutions (including museums, galleries, libraries, archives, and historic sites) have histories, and inherited ways of knowing, doing, and being that shape them. Through repetition, the practices of such institutions and the effects they produce become taken for granted and difficult to perceive. At the same time, they give us pasts that shape our presents and direct us towards, and away from, possible futures. This chapter brings a queer phenomenological analysis to heritage ethics in order to develop a critique of, and reorient discussion around, the ways in which heritage institutions have, and continue to, reproduce(d) inherited standpoints that uphold heteronormative systems of power and privilege. Such standpoints, we argue, exclude ‘other’ ways of knowing, doing, and being, and thus other pasts, presents, and futures. In queering the orienting practices that produce such effects, we articulate a performative ethics that opens up the matter of heritage and/or heritability, to what Ahmed would describe as other lines of knowing, doing, and being. In order to illustrate our argument, we engage with the work of queer artist Gerwyn Davies whose project and exhibition, Iridescent , embodies the practice of queer ethics in the context of heritage.