The narcissism of queer concept

The museum devoted to conserving and displaying Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, printed a weblog submit this week about ‘queering the Mary Rose’s assortment’. It promised to know the gadgets recovered from this Sixteenth-century wreck, from nit combs to gold rings and paternosters, via a ‘queer lens’.

The outcomes are ridiculous. The connections between these things and ‘queerness’ are a figment of the curators’ imaginations. Take the Mary Rose Museum’s description of a salvaged picket mirror body:

‘Taking a look at your individual reflection in a mirror can deliver up a lot of feelings for each straight and LGBTQ+ individuals. For queer individuals, we might expertise a robust feeling of gender dysphoria once we look right into a mirror, a sense of misery attributable to our reflection conflicting with our personal gender identities. Alternatively, we might expertise gender euphoria when wanting in a mirror, when how we really feel on the within matches our reflection.’

This tells us nothing in regards to the nature of the mirror body or the position and significance of mirrors in Sixteenth-century England. It’s an expression of latest id politics.

There isn’t any good cause for eager to ‘queer’ this assortment. The artefacts on show on the Mary Rose Museum belong to the Tudor period. They supply perception into that particular world. Certainly, the sheer distinction between then and now could be exactly what makes the examine of historical past so thrilling. I used to be dwelling simply miles from the place the Mary Rose wreck was found within the Solent in 1971. I bear in mind how, aged 11, my pals and I all turned (fleetingly) obsessive about Tudor historical past. We wished to know in regards to the fashions, the wars and Henry’s wives. In my case, it resulted in a slightly grotesque college undertaking on torture and punishment within the Sixteenth century. This demonstrated the reality of LP Hartley’s commentary that ‘the previous is a overseas nation; they do issues in another way there’.

Reinterpreting the artefacts from the Mary Rose via the trendy up to date prism of queerness erases any distinction between previous and current. Consequently, it tells us little or no in regards to the previous. However then once more, it’s not meant to.

The so-called queering-the-museum motion, which was launched in Amsterdam in 2016, is all about up to date id politics. It rests on the belief that museum curation is simply too ‘heteronormative’. By queering museum collections, activist curators declare they’re together with and representing homosexual and gender non-conforming individuals.

That no less than is the target. However the precise result’s an train in narcissism. It turns the previous into little greater than a mirror reflecting the identitarian obsessions of the current again at us. It tells us lower than nothing

And no surprise. Understanding the previous via a ‘queer’ prism is profoundly ahistorical. Within the 1500s, ‘queer’ didn’t imply what it does as we speak. It meant ‘unusual, peculiar, odd or eccentric’, and had nothing to do with sexual or gender id in any respect. Queer solely began for use as a time period for homosexual males on the flip of the twentieth century. And ‘queer research’ was not named as such till the mid-Nineties. Viewing the Mary Rose assortment via a ‘queer’ lens is to obscure its historic specificity.

It’s not simply the Mary Rose Museum that has succumbed to the cult of queer concept, both. Much more bizarrely, the British Library claimed throughout Pleasure month this 12 months that the animal world could be considered via a queer lens. And so Britain’s nationwide centre of information and studying staged occasions ‘celebrat[ing] nature in all its queerness’. Specifically, it focussed on animals whose sexual behaviour breaks free from commonplace ‘gender roles’, from bisexual penguins and lesbian albatrosses to gender-bending fish. ‘[Researchers’] discoveries’, acknowledged a press launch, ‘present that animal sexuality is much extra various than we as soon as thought and has been restricted by slender human stereotypes of heterosexuality, monogamy and gender roles’.

That is clearly absurd. Animals don’t expertise or possess a way of id, sexuality or gender. For a fish to ‘bend’ gender it will want to know what gender is and how one can subvert it – fairly an achievement for a creature with a five-second reminiscence recall.

Making use of ‘queer’ fashions to the animal world on this approach does a disservice not simply to our data of animals, but in addition to our understanding of people. Non-human animals purpose to stay alive and cozy and propagate their species. Human intercourse and sexual id goes far past mere survival and luxury. Whereas there could also be many fascinating the reason why two feminine penguins pair off, we could be sure {that a} sense of lesbian self-identity just isn’t certainly one of them.

Because the instances of the Mary Rose Museum and the British Library present, queer methodology doesn’t assist us to know historical past or nature. That is hardly a shock. Making use of a queer lens to species or epochs the place it has no place merely exposes the banality of queer concept. It sees nothing however its personal reflection. This narcissistic endeavour is now posing a menace to data itself.