Towards Queer Tours in Science and Technology Museums

Abstract

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.