Museum Queeries: Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and LGBTTQ* Interventions into Museums, Archives, and Curating
Edited by Angela Failler, Sabrina Mark, Michelle McGeough, and Heather Milne
Jagiellonian University Press
This book explores Two-Spirit and LGBTTQ* contributions to and interventions in museums and museum studies, both as a means of addressing structural exclusions and of opening new modes of productive inquiry and activism. Building on the inroads that have been made into existing museological practice and scholarship, the collection brings new voices and concerns to the field. For the contributors to this volume, “queering the museum” is not only about addressing representations of gender and sexuality, but also challenging white privilege, racism, and settler colonialism among other structures of oppression as they operate alongside and with heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in and beyond museums, archives, and galleries. To challenge these norms in the context of museums and other knowledge producing institutions means that “queering” must also, simultaneously and inextricably, be decolonial. That is, queering and decolonizing are inseparable strategies if we understand that heteronormativity and gender binaries are constructions that stem from colonial logics and are upheld by colonial institutions. The book features essays by artists, curators, and scholars—emerging and established—from a range of disciplines including Art History, Cultural Studies, Curatorial Studies, English, Indigenous Studies, Museum Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies.
team members
Angela Failler
Angela Failler, PhD is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and former Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory at the University of Winnipeg where she established the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies and served as its inaugural Director. Her research is focused on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with the ongoing effects of historical violence and injustice. She leads a long-term study on public memory of the 1985 Air India Bombings, and new research on inherited memories of Chinese exclusion. She is also co-lead of the Museum Queeries cluster and co-editor of Museum Queeries: Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and LGBTTQ* Interventions into Museums, Archives, and Curating (2026).
Role: Co-Investigator + Coordinating Committee
Cluster: Museum Queeries
Michelle McGeough
Michelle McGeough, PhD (Métis/Cree) is originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, in the treaty six region of what is currently referred to as Canada. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her PhD in Indigenous Art Histories from the University of New Mexico. Her research interests have focused on the Indigenous two-spirit/Indigiqueer identity.
Role: Co-Investigator
Cluster: Museum Queeries
Heather Milne
Heather Milne, PhD is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and one of the co-leads of the Museum Queeries research cluster. Her teaching and research interests focus on queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, as well as poetry and poetics. She is the author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect and the Posthuman in Twenty First Century North American Feminist Poetics. She is very interested in how museums navigate their relationship to neoliberalism and homonationalism.
Role: Co-Investigator
Cluster: Museum Queeries
Sabrina Mark
Sabrina Mark works as the Research Coordinator for the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies (CRiCS) at the University of Winnipeg. She obtained her PhD from the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba. Her dissertation focused on mobility and the imagined roles of girls and women in nation-building in popular early twentieth-century girls’ novels. Her other research interests include children’s literature, critical race theory, textual depictions of dress, and the fiction of L.M. Montgomery.
Role: Research Assistant
Cluster: Museum Queeries