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Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-8890621

2328-9260

Sebastian Felten, Rebecca Kahn,

Libraries and Information Services

Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum? (January 18–March 1, 2019, Schwules Museum Berlin) was a small exhibition that showed about 150 archival objects in two rooms of the Schwules Museum (SMU) at the beginning of 2019. The objects displayed were created by, or contained information about, trans-identified people, and for the most part (except for one loan from the Lili Elbe Archive for Trans, Inter, and Queer History Berlin) were taken from the Schwules Museum's own collection. The aim of the exhibition was to encourage debate about the SMU's archival practice by posing several questions. Can an archive, as a place where meaning seems fixed and people come to seek out "truths," be challenged to accommodate new voices and perspectives? Can archivists reveal trans narratives without breaking up collections? And how do they deal with changing terminology? In an attempt to address these questions, the exhibition mapped a four-stage journey of archival objects at the SMU: their arrival in the archive, their documentation and classification, reflections on how they have been displayed in the past, and, finally, speculation about what might become of them in the future. An important feature was visitors' feedback, for which we provided preprinted slips and ample wall space. Visitors were encouraged to engage with the objects and offer their own interpretations (see fig. 1). Some feedback led to changes in the SMU's archival practice (Schwules Museum 2019). In the first part of this field report, we describe the planning and execution of the show. In the second part, we reflect on communities and finding aids and, more generally, how identity politics intersects with archival technology.When it was founded and began collecting in the mid-1980s, the SMU drew most of its material from the gay community of Berlin. As a community endeavor with limited resources, the museum collected "passively." It mostly accepted donations of whatever their public would offer and only occasionally sought out and purchased specific materials. As a result, trans-related materials were acquired in a haphazard fashion. This sets it apart from archives whose collection policies are expressly focused on documentation of transgender lives and the transgender movement (such as the Lili Elbe Archive). Larger bequests (such as the Charlotte von Mahlsdorf estate) are well cataloged, while other materials are poorly documented. This discrepancy became apparent when increasing numbers of requests began to be made by researchers interested in trans-related collections. The museum therefore began to take measures to make less well-documented materials more accessible.From autumn 2017 to summer 2018, Sebastian Felten worked as a volunteer in the archive. The SMU's archivists suggested a survey and consolidation of trans-related materials that they suspected were dispersed across different general collections (such as the postcard collection). This work was carried out between November 2017 and June 2018, with help from Niki Trauthwein of the Lili Elbe Archive. In the summer of 2018, the SMU suggested a show of some of their trans-related material. As a historian working on very different themes, Sebastian did not feel qualified to use the material as the basis for an exhibition about trans history. He and the museologist Rebecca Kahn developed the idea to focus instead on archival practice at the museum, not least to raise awareness of the museum's increasingly urgent need of resources for cataloging and digitization, especially for some of the trans-related collections.The original intention of the exhibition was to publicly examine the body of trans materials in the collection for possible silences, mislabeling, and invisibilities. We wanted to give the museum and its visitors an opportunity to think about the collection in ways that moved the focus away from identity politics and toward the role of archival practice in the development, description, and use of a complex collection like the SMU's. We chose specific objects to spark conversations primarily about the collection, not about the historical trans lives that they embodied. In this manner, Unboxed aimed to be an invitation to the public to engage in an ongoing process of surveying trans-related material in the collections of the SMU. At the same time, we intended to make visible the tensions faced by archivists when trying to rethink and revisit collections. The archival imperative to keep historical materials discoverable was positioned against the need to reflect on when terms may or may not be outdated, inaccurate, or cause harm. As curators, we tried to hold on to the fact that the objective of the exhibition was not to critique the work done by the volunteers, staff, and curators but to reveal these processes and highlight their complexities.From the outset, all parties agreed that it was imperative to involve representatives of the Berlin trans community in the planning of the exhibition. It was considered problematic that the project was conceived and developed by cis scholars at an institution that has, at times, been perceived as trans-exclusionary. Furthermore, it was unclear to what degree some of the materials were originally categorized using a cis gaze. To facilitate discussions around these themes, members of the museum's board established contact with Zoya, a community activist, who agreed to act as a consultant to the project. Zoya, Sebastian, and Rebecca met a number of times to discuss the aims and method of the exhibition as well as to jointly decide on which materials to include in the exhibition. Furthermore, Zoya commented on and critiqued Sebastian's and Rebecca's texts and authored one of the introductory texts that was on display.The exhibition consisted of several parts. An introductory wall explained how Unboxed came about and what its aims were. A first section named "Arrival" contrasted different ways in which the museum had acquired materials, which, at the time of their acquisition, were classified and cataloged as being trans or trans-related. As far as possible we tried to find the backstories to these collections, but this was not always possible, for reasons detailed in the next section. The self-identified gay transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had donated some of her material before her death. Another donor gave scrapbooks and copies of Transvestia magazine but wished to remain anonymous. Three albums from the 1970s containing photographs of unknown people engaging in cross-dressing, BDSM, and race play had been purchased from a deceased estate. The more than thirty private photo albums of trans-identified circus artiste Suleika Aldini were acquired after a process of lengthy and sometimes fraught meetings with archivists from the museum. Transsexual activist Nadja Schallenberg had donated her papers to a community center whose archive was later acquired by the SMU. The second section, "Boxed," displayed Sebastian's own ongoing archival work by showing materials that were being regrouped and relabeled. The third section, "On Show," focused on a number of important past exhibitions in which trans-related material had been on display: Homosexualität_en (2015), which one of the SMU founders described as "a milestone on our path from being a gay project to being a forum that is open for all facets of the LGBTIQ scene" (Theis 2015); Trans*_Homo (2012), which investigated what gay and lesbian could mean for trans people; and The Lightest Shade of Aflatoon (2017), which was the SMU's first exhibition to focus on the perspectives of queer refugees. The fourth section, "Transformations," speculated about possible future uses of the museum's collection by showing Dear Lou Sullivan, a video work by Los Angeles–based artist Rhys Ernst (2014) that drew on archival footage. We gave guided tours through the exhibition, accompanied by Nadja Schallenberg who talked about her experience and activist work as a transsexual lesbian in the German Democratic Republic and reunited Germany. During the exhibition, Schallenberg also showed a biographical film, MaPa (Strohfeldt 2008), and donated new material to the museum, one of which was showcased as "Object of the Month" (Schallenberg 1990).Rather than asking visitors for overall impressions, we wanted to elicit direct responses to specific objects and displays, and show these responses publicly, as a means of enabling visitors to talk back to and possibly inform current archival practice at the museum. We provided wall space and encouraged visitors to write on paper slips, which they stuck on the feedback walls or next to specific objects. The slips were printed with a series of questions to prompt feedback, such as "what do you see here?" or "what's missing?," and also included a space in which visitors had the option to indicate their gender identity. A sealed box for anonymous feedback was also included. We were pleased by the volume of the feedback and the level of engagement we read in the responses. One of the displays that elicited the most feedback was the selection from the Suleika Aldini collection, which had originally included her legal name. As a result of the feedback received (fig. 2), the museum took the decision to rename the collection.Looking back on our experience, we would like to raise three related points about communities, institutional memory, and archival technology. At some point in the exhibition planning discussions, the idea emerged that the museum did not have a lot of trans material to begin with, that the little material there was had been neglected, was poorly cataloged, if at all, and that this work had been done by cis people. This idea stuck, in part because it struck a nerve at an institution that was riven by two factions: the self-proclaimed "queer feminists" and (for lack of a better term) the "gay traditionalists." Discussions revolved around silencing (or not), collecting policy, and identity politics. This gave the exhibition a clearer goal of "doing the right thing" (a concern for the queer feminists) and an extra impetus for working closely with the collection as it was (a concern for the gay traditionalists).However, when we began to put the exhibition together, we were quickly disabused of our preconceptions. We found plenty of material, some of it beautifully cataloged, and some of it even cataloged by trans-identified people. For example, there was a sizeable amount of material from West Berlin drag theatres (Travestie). We knew of course that "drag is not trans" (as one of our feedback slips reminded us), but it turned out that these theatres offered some trans-identified folk space for self-expression and, more importantly, a livelihood. Work there was not always easy: Aldini reported being harassed during police raids, and transsexual performers tended to disappear from the scene after the West German Transsexuality Law (1980) enabled them to take up more "respectable" work. Another pocket of trans-related material was about Tunten (a German form of political drag), though we didn't understand the relevance of this material until after the show was set up. One long-term volunteer expressed their disappointment that Tunten had not been more prominent in our show as self-identified transgender people. This disappointment was poignant because this community had long been affiliated with the SMU but effectively silenced by our show. And, finally, we realized late in the production process that an important earlier exhibition, Trans*_Homo, had already done a lot of our conceptual legwork. In short, there had been vigorous involvement of trans people and trans agendas at this gay museum. At the same time, though, we regularly encountered the persistent opinion that the museum has been systematically excluding trans voices. When we called Schallenberg to ask for permission to show some of her papers, she said, "I'm glad the museum is finally telling this story. It was about time."We cannot resolve this tension, but we can offer two possible ways of explaining it. First, it became clear that our exhibition brought together not one trans community but rather many different ones. Each had its own trajectory and left different traces in the archive. Schallenberg's stories about the legal intricacies of leading a transsexual life under two German systems seemed several steps removed from Zoya's concerns about intersectional trans inclusivity. Aldini's experience as a Romani woman and drag artiste in West Berlin did not seem to intersect much with the international but clandestine network of white transvestites that were documented in the anonymous photo albums. And so forth. Only some trans communities have inscribed themselves in the archive, which means that we have to think in more precise terms about mechanisms of exclusion. The most glaring absence from the collection is material relating to transmen, who make scant appearances in newspaper clippings and are overshadowed (if this is the apt term) by gay transvestites and transwomen. As Zoya rightly pointed out, gay is not per se a trans-exclusionary term. It can be made to be so, but there are many trans folk who have, or have moved through, gay identities. How, then, do we explain the absence of (gay) transmasculinity?Second, we realized that the SMU's institutional memory worked in ways that we did not anticipate. We knew from earlier fieldwork that even in a well-funded, hyper-professional colossus like the British Museum, institutional memory could be difficult to maintain (Blagoev, Felten, and Kahn 2018). It turned out that in a community-run archive with few permanent staff and a high turnover of external curators and volunteers, it was even more difficult to make information available for curation and research. We learned about object provenance and past exhibitions in conversations held in the corridors, in phone calls with former staff, and by making visits to former curators. One artwork could not be located until we asked the right person. It would be standard practice to store all this information in a central objects record. Instead, the SMU stores it in paper folders, albums, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and people. It was fun and sociable to ferret out the information we needed, but sometimes it was a little frustrating, too. In retrospect, it is difficult for us to distinguish between physical absence of trans material and its momentary inaccessibility. Had we talked to the right person or chanced upon the right folder, we might have unearthed more material or richer stories. Since this applies to the entire collection, it would be difficult for us to see this as systematic exclusion or neglect of trans material in particular.We raise these points not to shame the SMU or its hard-working archivists (particularly archivist Kristine Schmidt, whose help was invaluable). Rather, we want to invite reflection on how the modus operandi that makes queer archives such vibrant places articulates with discussions about identity politics and community relations. Looking back, we suspect that misplacing was a bigger problem than misgendering. Queer archives and museums around the world have to respond to calls from previously underrepresented communities for inclusion. Our experience at the SMU suggests that one important focus of critique should be on the technical means that enable access to the collections, not only the collections themselves or how they are presented. Some organizations are doing this work and think hard about ways to make museum information systems (i.e., catalogs) more reflective of the communities they (now) represent (in particular, the work of the Digital Transgender Archive and the GLBT Historical Society were constant reference points for us). Digital record keeping, which logs acquisition and exhibition data, makes it easier to tell object biographies. An integrated catalog makes it easy to survey what objects are held in a collection and to adapt terms used to address them. We are pleased that the SMU is taking steps toward this goal. Historically gay, lesbian, or gay and lesbian community archives have much to talk about how they could be more welcoming places for previously excluded communities. But they also have to talk about ways to improve their information technology. The latter may be an easier conversation to have.The exhibition production team consisted of Rebecca Kahn and Sebastian Felten (curation), Zoya (post-hoc intervention and consultation), Anina Falasca (project management), Larissa Wunderlich (exhibition design), and Jörg Krüger (production).