Towards Queer Tours in Science and Technology Museums

This paper argues that the Queering the Science Museum tour series (2018) provides an example of a conceptual pathway for translating queer tour guiding approaches found in socio-historical and arts museums into STEMM spaces. I use participatory methods and qualitative and quantitative participant d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Eleanor Sophie Armstrong
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: University of Leicester 2022-11-01
Series:Museum & Society
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/3941
Description
Summary:This paper argues that the Queering the Science Museum tour series (2018) provides an example of a conceptual pathway for translating queer tour guiding approaches found in socio-historical and arts museums into STEMM spaces. I use participatory methods and qualitative and quantitative participant data to reflect on my work on the tours in the context of wider practices of tour-guided interventions. I highlight how the Queering the Science Museum tours, at the Science Museum, London, moved beyond existing models of queer engagement in socio-historic and arts museums by introducing an explicitly critically queer approach to science and technology, which has the potential to expand the possibility of queer interventions in museums generally. I close by examining the limitations of tour-as-intervention for change within the museum, while exposing the tensions around how resolving such issues would challenge queer theory’s call for rejecting the making of queer ‘normal’ within displays.
ISSN:1479-8360