Mary Rose Museum's Queer Lense

Not to derail too much but: I went to an English speaking show by a German comedian at Soho Theatre a few years ago. He said in the programme that while we had all the regular subjects we also had three hours of guilt every week.

He is not wrong. I can only go by my school and, to an extent, my siblings but we spent a whole year on WW I, Weimar Republic, rise of the Nazis, Third Reich and WW II. The latter two took about 3/4 of the lessons that year. Almost all of us had parents who were born after the war.

The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather?

I started reading that and had to give up, just too much guessing by the author.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 10/08/2023 13:22

Agricola moaned to Tacitus about it as well - 'the climate is wretched, with frequent rains and mists.' Shove off back to Rome then, no one asked you to invade (said the Brittunculi - (nasty little Brits) - according to the Vindolanda tablets.)

As reported in the Nuntius Cotidiana, circa 123 AD...

(I don't speak Latin, it's probably wrong...)

I wonder where all these concerned archivists and curators have been hiding for all the many many years while women’s history, women artist’s contributions to art and culture and women’s place in society through the millennia have been ignored, stored forgotten in the basement archives, not acknowledged or recognised in museum labels. You know, women, tits and vaginas, 50% of the worlds population.

Ditto people of colour.

Listening now. No mention of the queer nits thus far….

I heard that trail too. Suspect it will trail off into more colonisation / slavery type issues though.

The queering of the Mary Rose nit havers has just been trailed on R4 for discussion on Antisocial at midday. Adam Fleming has been useless on this stuff so far but at least it's getting an airing. I might tune in if my blood pressure feels up to it.

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins Waiting, and watching patiently, I'll just have a snack to keep up my energy levels whilst i wait.

@Boiledbeetle... watch this space...

@SammyScrounge

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins could do a through a fat persons lense: two fat people meeting for tea and cakes on a nice comfy sofa in a book shop!

@MillicentTrilbyHiggins you and @Boiledbeetle should join forces and be the official comedy duo. You made me laugh so much.😁

@GrabbyGabby I've been in fits trying to work out if my roses are trans or gay and whether the ivy which has invaded my hedge is nonbinary...
All this on top of the queer perspective on the relics at the Mary Rose Museum:the nit comb through a queer eye...
It's all too much.Let's move them all to the tropical house.

Germany's interesting. One of my former German colleagues said he felt so guilty after learning about the Third Reich at school, but he was born c. 1980. And a German trainer we had coming over to the UK started by apologising for the war, despite the fact that no one in the room was old enough to have been involved, and in most cases, even parents weren't born till after 1945. And that would have been over 15 years ago, so before the fashion for apology history really got going.

You're right, aiming for brevity I omitted the usual caveats. There's the disconnect between what we can know, say for example this thing was made. What we can guess at with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, what it did, who made it, and so on. And, then there's stuff we may only be able to speculate about, how the maker felt about it, why did they make it that particular way, ad infinitum. Then apply the same but to events. Then all the intersections.

I think I kind of get some of the reasoning that may lie behind the handwringing. Some bad thing happened, that needn't have happened, that shouldn't have happened. However, all the people who could have been held responsible are dead, as are most of the victims. We can't punish the guilty, we can't relieve the suffering of the victims but we should do something! Obviously, putting a few sanctimonious captions in a museum to make people, who have no connection to either party, feel bad is the way to go . Clearly, this is grossly oversimplified and not the whole story.

I have slight problems with "tell people what happened" because we only know what people tell us happened and that is not always reliable (just like if you asked people to give a witness statement about a car crash, few people would be "accurate" and the accounts would vary). But I would agree that there is a difference between telling us the different ways people in the past experienced events v. Interpreting events as if the people experience them had grown up in the 21st century.

And for all the past is a different place and we can never fully recapture what it was to be a person in X century, I am a fan of showing that there are similarities. If we view our ancestors as wholly different it is easy to get nostalgic about myths, and to think that we wouldn't behave in particular ways. In reality people in the past missed their spouses when they were away, grieved for lost family members, looted and scammed in times of crisis, complained that kids these days have no respect and not want to work, and wrote about how things were "better in the past".

I had some free time in Berlin earlier this year and blundered into the Ethnological Museum. They might as well have renamed it the Museum of White Guilt. It was just awful.

I thought I'd put this here because the Mary Rose gets a mention.

https://thecritic.co.uk/corrosive-curation/

I sometimes think all this handwringing about 'colonialism' is conflating two or more issues. We have to acknowledge history, warts and all, because otherwise it's not telling the full story. But the past is a foreign country. Aren't we now doing to our past what the British Empire did to the countries it colonised?

Tell people what happened, don't tell them how they should feel about it.

And don't shoehorn it into every single little thing.

Whether reparations should or can be made and if repatriation of artifacts should happen is another discussion entirely.

And it happened here too. Indentured, exploited, drafted, overworked, starved, evicted, etc., etc.

Well, yes. That’s the difference between employing actors following a script and bringing in people that have a passion (I work with the latter - their attention to detail is quite something).

But some can be really good - often these are the keen hobby re-enactors that have done a lot of research into that particular time period and stick to the known facts

Re-enactments I have no issue with when people have really researched it and try to be as authentic as they can. Sticking a black dress and a mob cap on someone isn't that.

Some of these are rubbish because they’re employed to be there on a daily basis, playing a role. But some can be really good - often these are the keen hobby re-enactors that have done a lot of research into that particular time period and stick to the known facts.

Snap with the visually impaired partner.

I have not forgiven the Wallace Collection for having a video on, OK the room needed to be a bit dark for the sake of the video but did they really need to hide it behind blackout curtains?

DH walked in, found he was completely blind and had to grope his way out.

White text on grey backgrounds is another issue. Don't mind exhibitions that have to be dark for conservation reasons but when it's just because the curator thought it was a cool look it's not on.

Museums seem to think that if they have provided a large text booklet and an artifact handling session, they have done visual impairment, no thought at all to the very significant number of people who have significant impairments but not enough to be registered blind/partially sighted.

I've taken to complaining to the Visitor Engagement/Accessibility person now after crap visits, they need to think about the whole of protected characteristics, not just the fun ones.

Discovered that recently. Love the old typewritten labels and the stuff shoved in cases and no patronising labels asking you 'and how do you think it would have felt being mummified?' and the like.

Even going to museums and such there is a real emphasis on actors in costumes you can talk to, and supposedly get "insight" into the feelings the real people had

I loathe those things with a passion. 'Hello, I'm Molly and today I'm here to tell you what it was like to be a maid at Blenheim Palace in the 1880s.' No you aren't, you're cosplaying. It's treating people from the past as if they were us but in fancy costumes when they were utterly different from us in so many ways that we can't even begin to understand.

I'm currently reading a biography of Witold Pilecki, written by a journalist rather than a historian, and the author keeps writing things such as Pilecki 'likely thought' this or 'must have felt' that or 'likely did' this or 'probably did' that. It's really irritating. Either give me direct evidence or at least show the reasoning behind making such assertions.

Yes, I gained a visually impaired partner a few months ago, and it's made me much more aware of how legible some signs are - and I already had some idea of poor colour combinations having studied it at uni.