How to make visible minorities so far invisible? Over the past decade or so, this issue has increasingly been a concern of heritage cultural institutions. The Study Day Heritage Disorder? LGBTQIA+ legacies and queer narratives: what role for heritage institutions? ", organized on Tuesday, April 30 by the National Heritage Institute’s Student Curators Association, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, proposed a reflection on several initiatives to heritage cultural practices of sexual minority and gender identity communities, long ignored. The opportunity to note, for the day of 17 May dedicated to the fight against LGBTphobias that, despite a call for more inclusiveness in the institutions, these processes remain very relative in France.
New heritage discourses in light of gender studies
Archaeology was one of the first heritage disciplines to tackle gender issues, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries in the 1970s. But these subjects are less studied in France. ' This can be explained by three factors, explains Caroline Trémeaud, head of the archaeological cell of the Ardennes. A problem of concept recognition, a real confusion between the concepts of gender and sex in archaeology and a lack of classical sources in pre-Romanesque societies, which tends to invisibilize women. ” Funerary archaeology provides a good example of our gender stereotypes that lead to over-interpretation of data. “ When you have a skeleton with a sword and you hesitate because its pelvis is a little fragmented, it often ends up becoming a man. »
The princely tomb of Vix (Côte-d'Or) of the VIe century, discovered in the 50s and known for its beautiful collection of funerary objects, is a fine example of genre archaeology. The absence of weapons and extensive analysis made it possible to formally establish that it housed the body of a female person. Its gender has long been difficult to define. “ Its owner is sometimes identified as a woman, a nomadic princess, sometimes associated with a more acceptable cult role as a shaman or transvestite priest. A last more recent explanation also emerged: it would be a woman of disgraced physique with a preeminent social position. Starting from all these stereotypes about the notion of identity, we say that there is still work on the notion of gender in archaeology ” says Caroline Trémeaud.
The experience of gay and lesbian activist archives
The gay and lesbian archives are hybrid places in their organization and their funds, composed of objects, books, textiles or oral testimonies… More than places of collection and conservation, they become new spaces of knowledge. Archives, Research, Lesbian Cultures (ARCL)created in 1983, is a militant archive dating from the 19th century to the present day. A recollection was undertaken in September 2023 to provide an overview of the collection. “ Our difficulty is that a lot of the inventories were done using different methods, but we didn’t really have any general data on the constitution of the funds, explains Doris Varichon, archivist at ARCL. It also makes it possible to weigh the burden of information on a tool and not on people. However, there are limitations to these tools: archival description, highly codified.
Another key word: accessibility. “ Our philosophy is to create welcoming and hospitable spaces to build a real inclusiveness to access this knowledge ” said Faustine Besançon, a doctoral student in gender studies at Paris 8–Vincennes University. This translates into visits to the centre by volunteers, exchange time and easier access to archives: here, there is no need for justification or to master the academic and institutional codes that can be discriminatory barriers that lesbian and queer people otherwise face. The ARCL operate in self-management in a fairly free place of life with a consultation in autonomy. There is not necessarily a contractualization when people come to bring their archives. “ Some came anonymously but we did not discuss with them the issues and the context ", notes Doris Varichon. This contract is being considered today, including for documents already tabled. Work will be conducted on conservation with an emergency plan in case of disaster or attack of the center to protect these archives.
The place of women artists in national collections
Do you know Romaine Brooks? This American lesbian painter was part of the elite of Paris Lesbos, this period of the early 1900s with artists gathered around Natalie Clifford Barney. This painter has made many portraits, especially of lesbians, today scattered throughout France, in Poitiers or the Franco-American museum of the castle of Blérancourt in the Aisne and visible especially during the exhibition Over the rainbow at the Centre Pompidou last year. Yet his work is little known and only four of his paintings are now part of the national collections. “ But they were little seen until the 80s, Abel Delattre, PhD student at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, who worked on women artists at the Museum of Modern Art and on the issue of acquisitions of their works. The one we see the most is the portrait of Cocteau which has circulated well in exhibitions devoted to the artist or in Paris. It was not until the 1980s that he circulated as part of exhibitions on Romaine Brooks. By this oversight, we forget the queer and lesbian context of Paris Lesvos. »
Based on this example, Abel Delattre asked himself about the works of artists queer and lesbians and their acquisitions. “ The first step is to give visibility to these works. But we must answer other questions such as the entry of these works into the national collections and whether and how they will fit into the works of today. »
Drag performance in cultural institutions
What place for drag in heritage institutions? Tuna Mess, performer and visual artist for 5 years who has collaborated with the Centre Pompidou and the Carreau du Temple in Paris, has for several years seen a better acceptance of drag, facilitated by the shows Drag Race France and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Is this television performance true to the realities of the discipline? “ The roots of drag are deep but the tree small. A person who discovers drag in this show can have a misunderstanding of our culture because its only reading grid is reality television. The public is not prepared or does not understand what they are seeing in an institution and what they are seeing is possibly devalued. » The performer wants to cultivate « traces of performance ” in the institutions. “ It is the representations of drag that go through reality television and producers who do not necessarily belong to the queer community that have the most feedback and visibility. An answer is important and if it can be done by the institutions, it is interesting. »
A cross-cutting dialogue on queer narratives in heritage
This day of study provided an opportunity to review various initiatives to better promote LGBTQIA++ heritage. In particular, archives have developed mainly through initiatives led by collectives and associations that exercise control over the management of their funds. For anthropologist Renaud Chantraine, who conducted a study on the patrimonialization of LGBTQI minorities, this phenomenon is due to a ' desire to document the traces of their communities often absent from traditional archives and other heritage institutions In addition to the ARCL, the association Aides AIDS has established a participatory archive system with activists. In Lyon, the Michel Chomarat collection in the Part-Dieu library is a true memory of gay culture with a collection of nearly 100,000 documents that continues to grow. An exhibition has retraced, in 2022, its thirty years.
The definition of museums proposed by ICOM has given a new place to inclusiveness. The museum becomes a place that aspires to embody the expectations and evolutions of societies. How, then, to make all their place to queer cultures and how to best value this heritage once entered the collections through mediation? Two examples were mentioned, one at National Museum of Education (Munaé) in Rouen and the other in Natural History Museum of Toulouse who have both dedicated exhibitions to LGBT topics. An incursion was also made into the monumental heritage, with a reflection on the places of LGBT memory in the public space, and in the Middle Ages through the visual sources representing Pope John VIII – or Pope Jeanne – childbearing.
Finally, the day went beyond French borders to focus on the slow and difficult patrimonialization of community archives and objects queer in sub-Saharan Africa and the role of territory in LGBTQ heritage through the example of the gay village of Montreal.
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