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.

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/

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'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.

Ah, that makes sense!

Off to look up the Warren Cup now...

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.

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."

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.

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)

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

This is a stretch...

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.

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.

@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!

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

Some reading on the Romans' attitude to male homosexuality would be enlightening. The practice was almost entirely exploitative.

Oh I'm sorry - my bad - must read the sources properly next time.......

I liked the tweet contrasting the grind required to actually uncover hidden LGBT stories in historical archives that are designed if anything to hide them, with this ahistorical nonsense.

Which reminds me of the endless efforts to ruin the statistical record now and to make it more difficult to track whether we are talking about male people, female people, gay or straight.

So for example I looked at some youth suicide statistics which said that being LGBTQ+ was an identifiable factor (not a single cause) in about 6% of suicides under 25. Without separating those elements out, it's frankly impossible to take any action about any of it.

And if an intern does work that's not publishable, it's their supervisor who should take responsibility for not publishing it, or if they do publish it, should put their own name out there.

Oh no, I wasn't very clear what I was referring to!

Life in 21st Britain through a fat person lens. Aldi edition.

I (a fat person) went to Aldi. Some fat people go to Aldi, some don't. There are many reasons fat people may choose to go to Aldi. It could be because it's their closest supermarket. Or they may nave popped in on their way home from somewhere else. Aldi is generally considered to be good value for money, so they may have gone there for that reason. Or maybe they just needed some milk!

Actually tempted to set up a threads account for this.

Oh so wonderful!

So brave!

So, what's the word I'm looking for? ...

Stunning

Can you do washing machines next?

Absolutely.

We cannot overlook the fact that, until recently, to be gay was a crime of varying descriptions, whether it’s the Buggery Act, accusations of public indecency and so on. Homosexual activities were a crime punishable by death until the 19th century. Of course, it still happened particularly among those rich enough to afford privacy and there were pockets of toleration (cf: molly houses) but this was the exception not the norm. These accusations brought shame and misery not just on the accused but their families.

On top of that, it may well have been shameful and downright offensive to the people involved to have been “accused” (as they would have seen it) of being a homosexual, a sodomite or simply “being unnatural” or “deviant”.

To foist on real people an identity which they may well have been horrified by is just not acceptable, in my book. The example that comes to mind here is Ammonite, the film about Mary Anning, which was “queered”

Absolutely!

(honourable exceptions: programmes like 'A House Through Time', although iirc even that did it a bit).

AHTT was one of the worst! In the series I saw, David Olusoga featured a bit about a man who’d gone to America to fight in the Civil War (IIRC). It was presented that he was a shit who’d abandoned his wife and children who later died, I think in the workhouse, but there are any number of reasons why he might have gone and not come back or indeed why his remaining family ended up in poverty. It absolutely infuriates me when historians apply a backstory for which there is absolutely no supporting case.

Sorry, forgot to answer this. You absolutely get a discount. Subject to passing "the mumsnet quiz" at the door.