- The Activist Museum Award
- Addressing the museum attendance and benefit gap
- Articulate
- Birmingham Museum Trust Vision
- Books connect 2
- Building inclusive museums
- Buried in the footnotes
- Cabinet of Curiosities
- A Catalyst for Change
- The Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of spatial cultural differences [CineMuseSpace]
- Contested Desires Constructive Dialogues
- Cultural activity within historic houses
- Developing learning advocates in the East Midlands
- Developing learning advocates in the North West
- Developing new audiences and promoting social inclusion
- Disorder, dissent and disruption
- Encountering the Unexpected
- Engage, learn, achieve
- Engaging archives with Inspiring Learning for All
- Engaging the City
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- EuNaMus
- Evaluating Creativity
- Everyone Welcome 2019-2021
- Everywhere and Nowhere
- Exceptional & Extraordinary
- EXILE at Kingston Lacy
- Generic learning outcomes
- girl.boy.child
- Growing social role of botanic gardens
- HumanKind
- Impact of generic learning outcomes
- Imperial War Museum North
- Including Museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums, second study
- Leaders in Co-creation?
- Learning impact research project
- Learning through Culture
- The Madonna of the pinks
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 1
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 2
- Mapping the change phase 2
- Mindful Museum
- Mirror
- Museu do Samba, Brazil
- Museums and an ageing population
- Museums and social inclusion: the GLLAM report
- Museums health and wellbeing
- Co-production Framework at National Museums Liverpool
- New Walk Museum vision
- Not for the likes of you
- Open House
- Open minds
- Participatory practices at the Science Museum
- Permissible Beauty
- Prejudice & Pride: exploring LGBTQ lives at the National Trust
- Prisoners, Punishment and Torture
- Redefining the Role of Botanic Gardens
- Research network to advance museum ethics
- Researching Learning in Museums and Galleries 1990-1999
- Rethinking Disability Representation
- shOUT
- Small museums and social inclusion
- Stories of a Different Kind
- Supporting Decolonial Futures
- Talking statues
- TCS project
- The Museum as a Space of Social Care
- The Queer Heritage and Collections Network
- Their Past Your Future 2
- Seeing the museum through the visitors’ eyes
- Trans-Inclusive Culture
- Museums and the Transgender Tipping Point
- Unfinished portrait at Felbrigg Hall
- “In the past we would just be invisible”
- What did you learn at the museum today?
- What did you learn at the museum today? Second study
- Return to the start of the menu
- RCMG
-
Research archive
- The Activist Museum Award
- Addressing the museum attendance and benefit gap
- Articulate
- Birmingham Museum Trust Vision
- Books connect 2
- Building inclusive museums
- Buried in the footnotes
- Cabinet of Curiosities
- A Catalyst for Change
- The Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of spatial cultural differences [CineMuseSpace]
- Contested Desires Constructive Dialogues
- Cultural activity within historic houses
- Developing learning advocates in the East Midlands
- Developing learning advocates in the North West
- Developing new audiences and promoting social inclusion
- Disorder, dissent and disruption
- Encountering the Unexpected
- Engage, learn, achieve
- Engaging archives with Inspiring Learning for All
- Engaging the City
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- EuNaMus
- Evaluating Creativity
- Everyone Welcome 2019-2021
- Everywhere and Nowhere
- Exceptional & Extraordinary
- EXILE at Kingston Lacy
- Generic learning outcomes
- girl.boy.child
- Growing social role of botanic gardens
- HumanKind
- Impact of generic learning outcomes
- Imperial War Museum North
- Including Museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums, second study
- Leaders in Co-creation?
- Learning impact research project
- Learning through Culture
- The Madonna of the pinks
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 1
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 2
- Mapping the change phase 2
- Mindful Museum
- Mirror
- Museu do Samba, Brazil
- Museums and an ageing population
- Museums and social inclusion: the GLLAM report
- Museums health and wellbeing
- Co-production Framework at National Museums Liverpool
- New Walk Museum vision
- Not for the likes of you
- Open House
- Open minds
- Participatory practices at the Science Museum
- Permissible Beauty
- Prejudice & Pride: exploring LGBTQ lives at the National Trust
- Prisoners, Punishment and Torture
- Redefining the Role of Botanic Gardens
- Research network to advance museum ethics
- Researching Learning in Museums and Galleries 1990-1999
- Rethinking Disability Representation
- shOUT
- Small museums and social inclusion
- Stories of a Different Kind
- Supporting Decolonial Futures
- Talking statues
- TCS project
- The Museum as a Space of Social Care
- The Queer Heritage and Collections Network
- Their Past Your Future 2
- Seeing the museum through the visitors’ eyes
- Trans-Inclusive Culture
- Museums and the Transgender Tipping Point
- Unfinished portrait at Felbrigg Hall
- “In the past we would just be invisible”
- What did you learn at the museum today?
- What did you learn at the museum today? Second study
Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG)
Museums and the Transgender Tipping Point
RCMG 20th Anniversary Event 2019
Over the past decade there has been a growing number of museum exhibitions and displays featuring transgender lives, reflecting an increasing trans-visibility across many areas of public life. At the same time, progressive representations – told from the perspectives and through the voices of transgender people, as well as being shaped out of an understanding of the human rights issues affecting the community, past and present – remain highly unusual.
How might these progressive portrayals – that privilege trans lived experience over other forms of expertise – be understood in relation to broader efforts to secure the rights of transgender people? To what extent might museum narratives of gender diversity be harnessed to inform the ways in which visitors perceive, think and talk about transgender equality and, potentially, to have positive influence more broadly beyond the institution? How might progressive portrayals of transgender lives potentially act upon the coercive, restricting and oppressive gender norms, and widespread prejudice, that pervade the variety of contexts within which transgender people attempt to claim and exercise their rights?
Richard Sandell introduced this session drawing on recent research to argue that progressive portrayals of transgender lived experience can be seen as a form of human rights work, carefully crafted and purposefully deployed with the specific aim to act upon the conditions which constrain equality and negatively impact the lives of transgender people.
E-J Scott (dress historian and curator) discussed the Museum of Transology – the first major exhibition in the UK (if not the world) to explore trans lives using the material culture surrounding them; an iconic museum project that has attracted enormous public interest and evoked extraordinarily powerful responses amongst visitors. The project began by gathering everyday objects and stories from the local trans community in Brighton, and developed into a collection of over 250 objects chosen by 108 trans people to represent their gender journeys. Heartfelt, brave and intimate, the deeply moving stories share themes of hope, despair, ambition, confidence and desire through objects of social history, dress, medicine, beauty products and personal ephemera, artists’ installations and portraiture. Brought together, these individual experiences provide a revelatory account of how gender politics has evolved in the UK, reflecting the increasing shift in social consciousness towards mainstream acceptance and legislative equality for the trans population.
This event for LGBT History Month was one of a series marking 20 years of the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries.