Mary Rose Museum's Queer Lense

[1stWorldProblems]

I bloody love this musuem & it's one of the few to use tech to enhance its exhibits with the "ghosts" it projects on the hull (as opposed to unnecessary "interactive" displays that 50-somethings are cool and break after a few months but which kids have seen better done on their tablets but that's another thread). This came up on my timeline today - viewing a number of their objects through a queer lens - or going on about 21st century concerns that can only be linked to the said object by tying yourself in knots.

https://maryrose.org/blog/collections/the-collections-team/queering-the-mary-rose-s-collection/

SO tedious - the wreck and the objects found are fascinating without layering on 21st century superfluous info. It's not even interesting or original thoughts - just the usual guff.

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.

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.

@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.

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

@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!

@Boiledbeetle... watch this space...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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...)

The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather?

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

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.