Queerness and Heritage

Heritage and culture are vital arenas where queer communities articulate resistance and belonging. Despite growing engagement with LGBTQIA+ histories, queer liberation through heritage remains contested amid political backlash. Queerness and Heritage interrogates these entanglements across diverse contexts.

Heritage and culture have long functioned as vital arenas through which queer and sexually dissident communities articulate resistance, belonging, and representation across the world. Yet, despite the cultural sector’s growing engagement with LGBTQIA+ histories and lives in recent decades, efforts to advance queer liberation and equality through heritage remain highly contested and uneven, with political polarisation and backlash contributing to significant setbacks. Queerness and Heritage interrogates these complex entanglements, tracing their intersections and trajectories of change across diverse cultural, social, and political contexts. Bringing together twenty-eight authors working at the intersections of scholarship, cultural practice, and activism across multiple contexts and geographies, this volume examines how queer heritage is produced, overlooked, marginalised, advanced, and reclaimed within the social world. From grassroots cultural practices and archives to major museums and heritage organisations, the contributors explore how heritage operates as a site of struggle and is enacted to advance solidarity, resistance, care, and repair. Building on scholarship that brings queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, heritage and museum studies into dialogue, this volume traces and advances new frameworks for understanding queerness and heritage. Queerness and Heritage provides critical insights for researchers and practitioners working across heritage, museums and culture as well as scholars and students in the fields of queer, gender, sexuality, and trans studies. The volume also speaks to those studying LGBTQIA+ equality movements, engaging in grassroots activism, and contributing to queer cultural production.