The epistemology of the basement: a queer theoretical reading of the institutional positionality of art museum educators

ABSTRACT

Art museum educators have long occupied a lower rank than their curatorial counterparts in the institutional hierarchies of their organizations. This manuscript provides an overview of research that attempted to make sense of art museum educator/curator positionalities by suggesting a sexed and gendered binary of museum work. I turn to queer theory to trouble and expand that analysis by situating education/curation as one of many contradictory discourses within a larger Western epistemological tradition that fueled myriad binaries and cast specific bodies in sexed and gendered ways. I utilize the physical structure of basement – the location of many art museum education departments and offices – as a corollary to the queer closet, a space to interrogate the charged education/curation pairing, explore the habitus of contemporary art museum educators, and evoke queer orientations that consider the basement a point of departure rather than a final point of physical and institutional situatedness.

KEYWORDS:

• Art museum education
• art museums
• queer theory
• feminist theory
• post-critical museologies
• habitus

In 2010, while working as an art museum educator in a university art museum, I finished writing a doctoral dissertation that used feminist theory to make some sense of what to me was personally and professionally a most pernicious problem: Why art museum educators, despite decades of professionalization and development in their field, were commonly regarded as secondary to and less essential than their curatorial counterparts by other museum staff members, boards, volunteers, and even visitors (Kletchka 2010). Through my research process, I began to understand their work to be feminized and gendered in a binary of male/female and curatorial/education within a professional hierarchy of art museums. Since that time, the field of art museum education (AME) has developed and changed (Acuff and Evans 2014; Villeneuve and Love 2017) as has the profession of curation (Bayer 2018; O’Neill and Wilson 2010; Reilly 2018) and the broader field of museology (Anderson 2012; Kletchka 2018; Bishop 2014; Dewdney, DiBosa, and Walsh 2013; Lang, Reeve, and Woolard 2016; Sullivan and Middleton 2020), blurring established boundaries and calling for deeper theoretical considerations. This manuscript provides an overview of past research that attempted to make sense of that positionality by suggesting a sexed and gendered binary of museum work. I utilize habitus, a Bordieusian analysis of power relations (Bourdieu 2010) to understand how the institutional structures of art museums maintain and reproduce status hierarchies and attempt to overcome previously-identified dichotomies by treating them as part of an overarching relational structure that not only encompasses ‘conditions of existence [but] generates practices, beliefs, perceptions feelings, and so forth in accordance with its own structure' (Maton 2007). Finally, I turn to queer theory to site the work of art museum educators, physically and conceptually, in the basement of art museums in the same way that Sedgwick and countless others use the ubiquitous queer metaphor of the closet – as an interior space of residing, being, enacting, and resisting with other educators. I then suggest changes in the field as a reimagining of the spatial and social orientations of art museum educators as way to begin to ‘find [y]our way’ (Ahmed 2006, 1) to alternative – indeed, queer – visions of futures in art museum education.

In my initial research, I used feminist theory, including Joan Wallach Scott’s construction of gender as a category of historical analysis (1999), to position art museum educators and their professional work as ‘female,’ as opposed to the ‘male’ tasks of curators, within a gendered binary of art museum work and to make sense of their complex connections (see Table 1). Curation, or the collection, organization, scholarship, and art-historical categorization of works of art, evolved as the dominant and thus male tasks of museum work. Notably, curators commonly transitioned into directing art museums as part of their professional trajectory of exhibition making and collection development (Obrist 2008), thus solidifying a cycle of curation and administration/direction as the most powerful, masculine-identified positions situated in the typical art museum hierarchy.

Table 1. Gendered art museum work hierarchy.

Education/Female Audience-oriented	Curatorial/Male Object-focused
Scheduling and organizing tours, events, & teacher professional development, both on and off-site.	Identifying works of art for exhibitions or galleries; conferring with other curators and scholars; creating checklists.
Planning and executing programs, speakers, public engagements.	Planning and executing in-house and traveling exhibitions.
Meeting with teachers, educators, and colleagues at community service organizations.	Meeting with artists, collectors, board members, and current/potential donors.
Researching exhibition-specific information (broad/generalist).	Researching in-depth art-historical and contextual information (specific/specialist).
Selecting speakers, artists, musicians, activities to complement exhibitions, engage visitors, and connect communities.	Selecting objects from permanent collections and/or other art museums and donors for display.
Developing interpretive strategies and programs related to exhibitions.	Developing thesis/conceptual framework of exhibitions.

Traditional responsibilities for art museum educators and parallel responsibilities for curators that may be considered epistemically charged pairings. This list is meant to be generative and does not encompass all of the responsibilities of art museum educators or curators.

I treated the years of 1965–1980 as an epistemological moment of ‘rupture’ (Foucault 1977), wherein the discourses of art museum education changed dramatically: A woman’s genial charge in the galleries became a profession, with professional associations and communities, a growing body of academic literature, university degrees and certificates, and government funding/tax¹ incentives attached with its presence.

These conclusions, which are indebted to feminist theoretical perspectives, satisfied my desire to understand the historical positionality of art museum educators. However, theory is, at its best, a form of possibility and liberation – it allows new ways of being and understanding to unfold even in the most unlikely places. My initial study was therefore an incomplete treatment of a complex institutional, professional, and social issue that may still benefit from further analysis. There were several sound elements of my argument: I acknowledged that museums have a long history as colonialist, heteronormative institutions (Duncan and Wallach 1980; Hein 2010; Steorn 2012); used theory to try and understand the positionality of employees who are historically marginalized in a Western-centric, patriarchal hierarchy; and brought attention to a long-standing issue of inequity in art museums within larger social, political, and cultural discourses. In hindsight, there were several ways in which I fell short.

Falling short with feminist theory

It is unsurprising that the people I wrote about were primarily white, straight, cisgender women – as far as we can tell, those were (and still are) the primary practitioners of education in art museums (Zeller 1985; Levin 2010; Kletchka 2021). While I was careful to consider race, class, and gender as an inseparable ‘Holy Trinity’ of critical scholarship (Kincheloe and McLaren 2005, 314); I nevertheless positioned the markers of sex and gender identity to take precedence on a practical and theoretical level. It simply did not occur to me how theoretical constructs beyond feminism, gender performativity (Butler 1999), and the deployment and resistance of power (Foucault 1977; McLaren 2004) might be used to inform my understandings of this particular group of people or to envision alternative futures for art museum educators and art museums.

Although queer theory was already broadly in academic use by the time I finished my doctoral work, I did not have the critical awareness necessary to utilize queer frameworks to explore phenomena in the same way that I used feminist theoretical tools. This awareness developed out of a sense of incompleteness and recognition that ‘insofar as identity and positionality are always effects of complex intersecting vectors of power and privilege a single focus on sexuality and/or gender is problematic’ (Sullivan and Middleton 2020, 22). This manuscript is a way of reckoning with the implications of queer theoretical perspectives on the positionality of art museum education and an attempt to draw deeper understandings from a partial, initial reading.

Queer theory in art education and critical museology

The uses of queer as a category of analysis, a pedagogical consideration, and a theoretical tool in art education (Kletchka et al 2020; Greteman 2017; Wolfgang and Rhoades 2017); and in critical museologies (Steorn 2012; Sullivan and Middleton 2020) have the potential to inform and transform art museum education, an academic discipline and professional practice that exists at the interstices of these fields. Researcher/practitioners Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton, in their recent critical text Queering the Museum, address the need to trouble contemporary museological discourses, which are rooted in professional taxonomies that are ‘cultural fictions that far from simply describing the world, shape it – we reproduce inherited ways of knowing, doing and being and exclude others’ (2020, 24). They argue, through Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, that the museum field is an embodiment of a particular social world, comprising ‘rules, rationales, practices, positions, and power relations, and its own underlying organizing principles’ (2020, p. 25) that are subconsciously reproduced, entrenched, and normalized in everyday practice. Specifically, these museological discourses may be examined through ‘distinctively queer methods’ that are useful in interrogating a variety of epistemological phenomena (Ghaziani and Brim 2019, 10–13). These queer methods share the following hallmarks:

1. They reject unchanging categories: For example, the term homosexual came about ca. 1869–1870, but the definition is not stable or universal and changes depending on the cultural and academic context from which it emanates.

2. They reject impermeable categories: Scholars must adopt strategies that can encompass historically complex, shifting subjects such as sexuality so as to ‘investigate the cultural contradictions of categories … and their allegedly unified meaning’ (Ghaziani and Brim 2019, 11).

3. They reject dualisms: Embracing conceptual binaries is limiting to contemporary research and ignores the possibilities of ‘multiple categories, new categories, and continua … that emerge from queer methods’ (12).

4. They reject interest group politics: If research is to create change, scholars must reject single-issue identity politics; partially because the power that courses through groups may also be used against minority members and because it does not reflect the lived experiences of the group as whole.

Thinking through queer theoretical perspectives

The epistemology of the basement

One early queer theoretical text offered an additional, more nuanced lens through which to site these shifts and turns. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), theorist Eve Sedgwick noted that in the last part of the nineteenth century – a time period notable for its extraordinary growth in the number and staff of United States art museums – ‘nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century western culture are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’ (1). She goes on to describe the contradictions in what she calls a ‘minoritizing’ view of homo/heterosexual definition, in which it affects only a small population who considers themselves what we would now call gay, and a ‘universalizing’ view, which claims such a definition as ‘an issue of continuing, determinitive importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities’ (1). In other words, the homo/heterosexual definition has permeated our understandings of not only human sexual identity, but Western culture and institutions more broadly. Furthermore, ‘Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge … the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms other relations by which we know’ (3). Sedgwick argues that this positioning extended to other constructs of Western society that are less visible, including ‘secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority … canonic/noncanonic … active/passive … cognition/paranoia, art/kitsch (1990, 11) and that there are those who profit from the incoherence of the discourses generated by these binaries.

Given a richer conception of these binarisms and a better understanding of art museum education as a discourse that emerged as part of a larger Western epistemology, I realized that considering the field through a male/female binary is similar to conceptualizing it through a homo/heterosexual conceptual binary – that is, it’s performative, self-contradictory, and discursive and as such avails itself to a deconstructive understanding that ‘makes it possible to identify [it] as [a] site that [is] peculiarly densely charged with lasting potential for powerful manipulation’ (10). While this expanded the scope of my understandings, it was still limited to pairings/binaries and spaces that already exist rather than spaces that might be imagined or created – that is, it reified the dispositions and tendencies of the field for art museum educators rather than rejecting them.

While queer as an adjective is situated in LGBTQ+ sexual identities, queer theory evolved and became useful in a way that is not fixed, stable, or necessarily comfortable. Feminist queer studies scholar Annamarie Jagose notes that ‘queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions’ (1996, 2) and that ‘simplistic attempts to evaluate this new terminology and conceptual framework ignore the fact that, since the late nineteenth century, knowledge [of homosexuality] has always been structured by strenuously contested categories’ (6). This use of queer theory in this context is intended to be generative rather than comparative and aligns with the fierce spirit of understanding those cultural phenomena that are not always straightforward or clear.

For the purposes of this theoretical analysis, I locate the professional performance of art museum educators not in the closet, a metaphor that has long served as a queer space of secrecy and silence; rather, I situate it in the basement – the physical area of art museums that typically housed art museum educators, unpaid docents, and other volunteers whose work was positioned as less important than their curatorial or administrative colleagues. Consider the following descriptions of twentieth century art museum educators in terms of their gender, location, and place:

Educators, however, had to know their place. Museum instructors, often women working in basement offices, occupied a position of low status, and had to tread lightly in the hallowed halls where art supposedly spoke for itself. (Rice 2003, 14)

Education departments, which are often relegated to the basements of our institutions, have been and frequently still are staffed with volunteers, a largely female group that is often unpaid. It is important … to acknowledge that women have played an important role … and it is not an accident that education departments are low in the hierarchy of priorities within our institutions. (Arth 1994, 97–98)

The metaphor of the closet as a structure of oppression may be useful for and have a parallel to the physical space of the basement, which also serves as an accessible conceptual space to interrogate the ‘epistemologically charged pairings’ (Sedgwick 1990, 72) that serve as sites of contestation within the sexed and gendered institutional discourses of art museums. Art museum educators are subjects of incoherence in an institution where curatorial positionality and rank – in relationship with works of art in galleries and storage, staff, board members, and the public – are more canonically coherent. This act of siting enables us to consider the conceptual location of these pairings with greater depth than before and disrupt the positionality of their performance by imagining the basement differently. For example, what might happen if we resist seeing basements as repositories of the disordered detritus of learning that live under the carefully orchestrated presentation of art-historical splendor and position the basement as it functions architecturally: The foundation of the community-centered work that goes on in the floors above?

Queer phenomenology

A second queer theoretical set of perspectives that offer guidance in understanding the positionality of art museum educators may be found in phenomenology, particularly as elucidated by queer feminist scholar Sara Ahmed in her 2006 text, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. I am particularly taken by the concept of orientation, which she initially considers broadly and only partially aligned with sexual nature as she seeks to understand how to find one’s way, know where one is, and situate oneself in space. She elides queer perspectives with phenomenology as it ‘can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasizes the importance of lived experiences, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds’ (2). She notes that phenomenology has been utilized to demonstrate the sexualization of specific spaces and has the potential of ‘offering a new way of thinking about the spatiality of sexuality, gender, and race’ (2).

Additionally, Ahmed suggests that we orient (she uses ‘orientate,’ the British English form of the word) ourselves bodily within particular spaces from starting points ‘from which the world unfolds: the ‘here’ of the body and the ‘where’ of its dwelling (Ahmed 2006, 8) and that emotions play a role in ‘what we come into contact with: they move us ‘toward’ and ‘away’ from such objects’ (Ahmed 2006, 2). Orientation devices frame the spaces that we inhabit and make it possible to create new spaces through a process of disorientation. For the purposes of this analysis, I suggest the basement as one orientation device that art museum educators may use to understand their inhabitance from which to encounter potential disorientations. The basement is, for most home and apartment dwellers, the place where one keeps things that are not required for the everyday goings-on of life but that are useful in certain situations: luggage, boxes of mementos and old yearbooks, dirty laundry, and old family photos. In art museums, you find the HVAC or boiler systems, unobtrusive entrances for caterers and electricians, a shop where exhibition furniture is built, and sometimes a secondary art storage area. They are the spaces that enable the building to run and exhibitions to be planned and mounted. To this day, the lower level of art museums often serves as an office area for educators and volunteer docents, a place where resources and touring schedules are kept and professional relationships are tended to, and people of all ages use their hands, minds, and imaginations to produce objects. You may find an education gallery (often a hallway) with works of art by local students, teachers, or participants of museum workshops. You may also find multipurpose rooms or studios with clay wheels and plastic tubs filled with acrylic paint and fabric scraps. You will very likely find offices scattered with piles of papers, professional journals, art history texts, and even tattered shells of old audio guides, just waiting for a trip to electronics recycling that no staff member has yet had a chance to take. The repeated rituals, tasks, and performances of educators’ work constitutes their inhabitance of the space; the orientation of which may be changed depending on how they conceptualize that work: ‘The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds or new contours of what we would call livable or inhabitable space … . Or we could say that some spaces extend certain bodies and simply do not leave room for others’ (Ahmed 2006, 11). The marvelous thing about orientations is that while they help us to understand situations and spaces, they are also flexible, mutable, and allow for change.

Habitus and queer museology

Let us return to Sullivan and Middleton’s conceptualization of Bourdieu’s habitus as a way of considering the reification of constructed patterns of professional behavior in the art museum environment. They argue that embodied knowledge – or ways of knowing, doing, and being – are inherited and internalized through ‘processes of socialization’ (2020, 23) and that they become so normalized as to be unremarkable and difficult to consciously disrupt. In art museums, there are particular disciplinary boundaries, tasks, experiences, groups, and educational backgrounds that comprise the habitus of professional art museum staff but there are also localized dispositions that belong to specific organizational cultures – for example, attitudes, traditions, celebrations, relationships, hierarchies, and more that create norms for that particular group of colleagues. This creates a double layer of epistemological conditions that must be reckoned with by those who operate within them. Consider the traditional responsibilities of art museum educators and curators noted in Table 1, which may also be understood as spatial, intellectual, and physical orienting devices by elucidating which tasks are community and audience focused as well as conceived of and carried out in educational or public spaces. If we generate an understanding of art museum education habitus to try and overcome the dichotomies (or binaries) noted in the tasks of educators and curators, we must consider an even more in depth analysis of the relationships between habitus, capital, and field – that is, the relationship between a habitus of art museum education, the capital (or rank/position) of educators and curators, and the field (or larger social arena in which this habitus is enacted) as well as specific art museum environments. If we recognize that typical responsibilities of art museum educators are not only gendered as ‘female’ but ascribed a lower rank than their curatorial counterparts that is generally accepted throughout the museological field, we can also assume that that it is possible to reorient – or queer – their work by shifting, eliding, and undoing hierarchical binaries implicit in those tasks. One way that this may be achieved is by asserting that their work does indeed add value to art-historical endeavors and/or by assigning responsibilities across educational and curatorial terrains regardless of positionality or physical location.

There are indications that the broader museological community and those who work within it are in fact recognizing and responding to their professional norms in radical ways, despite the fact that habitus is ‘fairly resistant to change’ (Swartz 1997, 107). Educators are increasingly situated as members of exhibition teams and museum staff across the board are expanding their commitment to communities as a matter of professional obligation (Anderson 2012; Kletchka 2018), thereby blurring boundaries, sharing authority, increasing transparency, shifting priorities, and taking on new roles within professional and disciplinary contexts. Specific developments in AME suggest that a queering of the educational habitus is already taking shape. One example of re-orienting professional positionality is evident by the eliding of disciplinary boundaries between artists, educators, communities, and curators in the educational or pedagogical turn, or the explicit adaptation of pedagogical methods and educational practices toward a praxis enacted by curators, artists, and even community members in heretofore traditional museum and gallery spaces. These pedagogical practices include participation, experience, dialogue, and collaboration that have been adopted and utilized by curators and artists in the service of exhibition practice (O’Neill and Wilson 2010). Conversely, the overlaps and interrelationships between contemporary art, museums, and art educators are creating spaces – outside of the basement – for art museum educators to conceptualize their work as a form of social practice in addition to a set of tasks that facilitate public participation in museum galleries. AME itself has experienced an ‘inward turn of critical reflection and praxis in theorizing the positionality of art museum educators as part of a larger institutional and cultural body’ (Kletchka and Carpenter, II 2018, 144). The breadth of that cultural body is vast, as reflected in ongoing professional development opportunities of the National Art Education Association and the American Association of Museums, in academic literature for museum workers and educators (Jung and Love 2017; Levin 2010; Sandell 2012; Silverman 2010); and the proliferation of social justice activism through groups such as Mass Action: The Museum as a Site for Social Action, Museums & Race: Transformation and Justice,#museumsarenotneutral, The Incluseum, and OF/BY/FOR All, to name just a few.

A final example of resisting the traditional habitus of art museum educators while shifting capital of practitioners in the field is elucidated in the concept of hybrid edu-curators, a curatorial/education model that highlights previously undervalued voices by facilitating collaborative exhibitions that center the concerns of visitors (Villeneuve and Love 2017). These shifts serve to re-orient our perspectives and imagine new ways of being, knowing, and doing for art museum educators. Perhaps most importantly, they encourage art museum educators themselves to seek new, queer orientations for their work, as noted in Sullivan and Craig’s text where they ‘argue for an account of ethics in the museum that recognized the constitutive relation between one’s world (in this case, one’s professional context – the museum), one’s embodied being or professional identity, ones actions or practice, and one’s position relative to others in the field’ (2020, p. 34).

Queer futures in art museum education

The necessity for educators to create new folds or contours that have previously been unthinkable is particularly salient now that we are reckoning with the implications of a global pandemic. Museum consultant Paul Gabriel, when writing about queer identity in museums, encouraged museum workers both ‘sort through’ and ‘grapple’ with the circumstances (2010, 73 & 74) that exist in our closets: ‘ … let’s not live in a quiet, panicked state of ‘Don’t open that door!’ We are all inside it – and it is profoundly inside us – whenever this junk inhabits and haunts us individually or collectively in our professional interactions with each other’ (74). In other words, educators, curators, directors, and others must do the work of realigning, or turning away from familiar points of orientation, to ‘follow new lines’ (Ahmed 2006, 17) so that ‘different worlds might even come into view’ (15). We do this by critically re-assessing assumptions, re-casting roles and responsibilities, and queering thinking when it comes to imagining the ways in which museums professionals might be positioned intellectually, socially, and physically and vis à vis one another. As Ahmed suggests, orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward. A queer phenomenology, perhaps, might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are ‘less proximate’ or even those that deviate or are deviant’ (Ahmed 2006, 3).

Conclusion

The consideration of art museum habitus through a queer phenomenological lens encourages us to conceptualize the art museum education basement not as a final point of physical situatedness and limitation, but as a foundation and a point of departure. Even as Sedgwick notes that ‘A canon seen to be genuinely unified by the maintenance of a particular tension of homo/heterosexual definition can scarcely be dismantled’ (1990, 54). We as museum workers are imbued with critical awareness that we must disrupt and resist our positionality, understand that ‘the canon must always be treated as a loaded one’ (54) and refuse the ‘pious obliviousness that allows for the transmission from one generation to another of texts that have the potential to dismantle the impacted foundations upon which a given culture rests’ (54).

Phenomenologically speaking, we can resist a professional positionality that ties us to binaries of male/female, hetero/homosexual, educator/curator on an institutional hierarchy and orient ourselves toward occupying a space that is not easily defined – one that defies boundaries, resists characterization, and dwells in new ways. A space that is more than a little queer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Carlisle Kletchka

Dana Carlisle Kletchka, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Art Museum Education and Faculty Director of the Museum Education and Administration Specialization in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University. Her research areas include post–critical art museum education theory; professional development for PreK–12 teachers in art museum contexts; the use of social media and digital technologies on interpretation and engagement in art museums; and the professional positionality of art museum educators within the profound paradigmatic shift of art museums over the last 50 years.

Notes

1 The tax act of 1969 allowed for museums in the United States to claim a tax exemption on net investment income and increased tax benefits to donors to ‘educational’ institutions.