Queer Storytelling in Visual Media

Part Four: Perspectives

Voices

• Combat symbolic annihilation: Part of why we chose this topic for our archive is we wanted to fight against symbolic annihilation of queer folks - their erasure from records and mainstream archives.

• Form an inclusive historical record: Highlight the works of queer artists who are often ignored or under-represented, leading to them often being erased from the historical record. Expose users to the stories of queer people that have always existed throughout history. We wanted to underscore this by having works from across different time periods, in diverse mediums, from various sources - having different artists and different nations represented.

• Positive impact on a marginalized community: We designed this archive with the queer community in mind as our primary users so that they could feel seen and empowered by representations of queerness throughout art history. Art has the power to inspire and shape how we think, and history gives us knowledge about those before us that helps inform what we do today. Seeing the stories of queer people represented throughout history has the unique potential to increase visibilty of a group that is often erased, and it can result in representational belonging. As discussed in previous sections, these "responses community members have to seeing their communities represented with complexity and nuance" to learn more about their community and "establish their histories" (Cawell et al., 2016, p. 75).

Limitations

We knew from the outset that due to limitations surrounding the project - with it being a one semester project designed to be limited in size and scope - we wouldn't be able to tell every story. We tried our best to give a diverse sampling, but several trends emerged that should be acknowledged as gaps in our voices.

• Use of a Western Timeline: We spent a lot of time considering how we wanted to organize our archive. Ultimately, we opted for a chronological arrangement to show the development of these stories through history, with the option of adding metadata to highlight other facets of the works. However, the timeline we drew from was based around Western ideas of eras - like the Renaissance, for example - and this meant that as we were searching for objects, we tended to drift towards Western items, because it was clear what time period they were fitting in. We became aware of this trend several weeks in and made a conscious effort to focus on finding non - Western items to balance out our collection, but our framing was still using a Western timeline. At the point at which this discussion came to a head, much of the design work around the archive had already been done, and we were not able to start from the ground up. It helped us all think about how we would approve things diffrently in future, but for the context of this archive, we have to just be honest about where we fell short and try to just acknowledge the tension between some of these labels not fitting non-Western items when we introduce them in the archive. 

• Male voices dominant: As mentioned in the historical context of several sections, at many times in history female homosexuality was simply not talked about or recorded - part of the larger phenemona of women being treated as secondary in patriarchal societies. Because of this, our archive has skewed more towards the male perspective and our items - particuarly our older ones - center more around male dominated visual narratives. 

• Paucity of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Genderqueer voices outside of Modern section: Because we were able to find more scholarship in older time periods about LGB artwork and cultural norms, and because of the nuances of constructing gender at points in history when understanding of its presentation was different than modern ideas, our selections tended to focus more on LGB sexuality, and our trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer voices ended up being mostly clustered in specific time periods. In many ways, this was an issue of our scope being overly broad, so we were not able to represent these identities as well as we hoped.