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.