Mary Rose Museum's Queer Lense

@londonmummy1966 I was talking about the V&A Queering the museum artcle linked to earlier, not the Mary Rose museum blog.

@terrywynne ahh yes, sorry should have warned you about the Warren Cup! I'm a Classicist - we tend to be a bit inurred against this type of stuff!

The article doesn't really match the headline. It seems to cover the perfectly sensible and mainstream idea of uncovering and telling the stories of previously marginalised and silenced groups, such as LGBT people - all good.

But it doesn't uncover or tell any stories about marginalised people on the MAry Rose, or even in Tudor times more widely which is what good gendered history should do. It takes four random objects and then tells us about how LGBT people feel in the C20th and C21st and assumes that that is how they've felt throughout the intervening period, which is extremely poor -I'd not have got away with that as a first year undergrad let alone as a masters student which this intern apparently is.

What bugs me is it's not (reaches I to jargon bag) centring the people .

Take the history, look frankly at what the people did and said, how they lived and felt, and put that first.

Any gloss or drawing of parallels between the historical characters and modern day theories and ideas is fine but always comes second.

I genuinely thought this was a parody when I clicked on that link!!!

This is a stretch...

Should really be getting in with work but have been mulling and getting more frustrated with the museum over this. There are 100s and 1000s of fascinating untold stories out there about past generations - untold because the people were impressed, marginalised or just seen as not worthy of study (it's not so very long since we started thinking the working class or women were worth studying). We should be celebrating these stories because they add depth to our understanding of our past.

But this post doesn't add depth. And it's even worse because it plays right into the hands of people who perceive any museum/TV show/book that tells a previously untold story as an attack on their sense of identity, and bleat on about liberal lefties and their woke rewriting of history to fit their agenda.

(I'll stop before the rant about the whole point of the academic study of history being "rewriting" as new evidence is uncovered or old evidence revisited, not to mention the impossibility of completely objective history as you always have to choose which facts/events/people you are going to focus on)

It seems to me that things are veering too far the other way. Yes, it can be hard to get people to engage with 'dead objects in museums' but nothing can now be interpreted, it seems, without someone complaining that 'I don’t see myself there'. Well, actually, that’s true for most of us. We have to use that thing called imagination and intelligence and, dare I say, put a bit of effort into it ourselves. It’s not all.about.you.

I'm maddened by the constant refrains on TV documentaries of 'if Dickens was alive today he’d be writing scripts for Eastenders'; 'Mozart was the Stormzy of his day', yadda yadda yadda (honourable exceptions: programmes like 'A House Through Time', although iirc even that did it a bit).

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Ok, the Warren Cup is more explicit than I was expecting!

It looks prime for the other type of parody - when historian's are too cautious about interpreting the past through a modern lense "whilst it may look like a sexual relationship between two men, we must remember that friendship and the depiction of friendship in the past was different. Without applying a modern perspective to the object, we cannot be sure that this is in fact not just two friends engaging in sport."

I’m all for talking about LGBT people in history. History can often pretend the don’t exist, see the attached pictures. However this is just tenuous in the extreme.
I do wonder if this was some kind of initiative by the people running the exhibition. They suddenly realise that they aren’t covering LGBT and ask the intern to do something.

Ah, that makes sense!

Off to look up the Warren Cup now...

I'll give it a go.

^This is a nit comb used to remover nits and lice, which the user would then kill. Male lice try to mate with every head louse of a suitable size regardless of the other louse being an adult female, a well-developed nymph louse of either gender or another male. This is obviously very queer and the nit combs,used to destroy queer colonies on the heteronormative heads of these sailors represent the danger faced by queer people at this time.

This ties us neatly to the gold ring, as after mating, both the male and the female must participate actively to separate from each other. Should one of them die during the mating, they will be stuck together forever. Which obviously represents life for queer people forced into straight marriage at the time.^

Actually, I think I did a better job of queering the Mary Rose than the museum and I should be given a job writing bullshit.

Oh I was talking about the V&A Dundee article not the shit Mary Rose blog.

As people say there are plenty of records and objects that point to a wide variety of identities and sexualities in the past without that desperate stuff.

The Warren cup anyone?

The Middlesex Sessions records contain a lot of rich stuff as well, but requires serious scholarship, not wot I reckons about objects.

I wonder if the museums determined to queer everything have reflected on whether those people in the past would have wanted to be outed and have their stories told?

Of course that's already been done:

dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/patriarchy/male-violence/library-hosts-transgender-art-weapons-kill-feminists/

From the Scottish design museum piece:

I hope we find a way to do something similar in the gallery, so that all experiences of queerness, whether it’s the working-class men cruising the streets of Glasgow in the early 20th century, or lesbians who were part of the Scottish Women’s Social and Political Union – or more recently in the Trans Pride Marches and resurgent queer literary scene of Scotland, are told. As these lives and histories are important, and no design history is complete without them.

Perhaps they could have some of the misogynistic placards as a display of design excellence? The "Decapitate TERFs" one for instance.

How I imagine the person who wrote this (but without the blue hair)

It is about telling the stories of marginalised and silenced groups at the appropriate museums/historic sites rather than at all of them (by making tenuous connections). It makes sense to talk about connections between Africa, Spain and England and the experiences of black people in Tudor England at the Mary Rose museum because we have evidence that connects those stories to the ship.

Talking about LGBT experiences in Tudor England makes more sense somewhere like Farleigh Hungerford (though that is a far smaller visitor attraction) because Lord Hungerford was executed due to the Tudor Buggery Law.

Why not just say improving representarion of LGBT people? Or telling the stories of LGBT people?

LGBTQ+, you monster!

And how would we know the sexuality of any of the crew of the Mary Rose?

And frankly, why does it matter? the story is fascinating enough without having people's random preoccupations projected onto it.

Fun fact - the admiral of the Mary Rose was married to the daughter of one of Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers.

It seems to cover the perfectly sensible and mainstream idea of uncovering and telling the stories of previously marginalised and silenced groups, such as LGBT people - all good

Because it imposes a random, un-evidenced and unrelated interpretation on an artefact, that's why. We have no idea how many 'marginalised and silenced' LGBT people were on the Mary Rose or if in fact there were any. It's the hijacking of history for a narrow agenda and the problem with it is a lot of people will read it, and take it as true (because a respected museum said so).

The problem with telling the stories of silenced groups lies in the fact that they WERE silenced. You aren't telling their story, you're telling what you think ought to be their story and what you want to be their story. And interpreting everything through that lens, whether it's justified or not. (See comment above about people believing it).

The article doesn't really match the headline. It seems to cover the perfectly sensible and mainstream idea of uncovering and telling the stories of previously marginalised and silenced groups, such as LGBT people - all good.

And how would we know the sexuality of any of the crew of the Mary Rose? As for the T, gender identity wasn't invented until the 1960s at the very earliest.

I almost went the other week but didn't, I'll pop up soon and pay a visit.

Thank you - I always forget how to spell the name of the French ship!

I remember the story because of Edward Howard who I have always imagine as a swash buckling Errol Flynn type - swearing revenge for his friend's death on the Regent only to die himself in a reckless attack (going down clutching his admiral's whistle of office).

Wasn't the Mary Rose also top heavy with too many guns (trying to impress the French) so that when she heeled over with the wind the weight pulled her over and she took on water? Carew's also reported to have said something about 'Knaves I cannot rule,' the theory being they didn't understand the order to close the gunports.

At the time, the Mary Rose was heading north towards Spitbank, which would have grounded her, so the master knew he’d have to turn and quickly. It’s possible that the ship heeled whilst trying to make a sharp turn, which allowed water in through the open gun ports. She may already have been holed by the French earlier in the day on the port side around the waterline, so water might already have accumulated and the extra ingress through the gun ports was enough to destabilise her.

The article doesn't really match the headline. It seems to cover the perfectly sensible and mainstream idea of uncovering and telling the stories of previously marginalised and silenced groups, such as LGBT people - all good.

The phrase "queering the museum" is awful though. Why not just say improving representarion of LGBT people? Or telling the stories of LGBT people? Maybe it is much instinctive negative reaction to the word queer as I recall it as an awful term of abuse aimed at gay people when I was younger.