Queer History Night: Cruising the National Maritime Museum

Join the Queer History Club for an evening of LGBTQ+ history at the National Maritime Museum.

Hear from members of the LGBTQ+ community-led group to learn about their creative research methods, queering and being-queer-in the museum collections and archives. Queer History Club members invite you to board our 'cruise ship' for a special evening of artworks, theories and conversations about queer/ing maritime history.

Queer History Club is an informal, community-centred research group meeting monthly at the National Maritime Museum. If you’re interested in joining, come along and find out more. No historical expertise required. Queer passions, special interests and historical crushes very much encouraged.

Programme

6:00 

Doors open, cashless bar available

6:30

Introductions 

6:40 

Is this about a boy? Recovering transmasc lives in the archive 

This talk focusses on female sailors and people assigned female who sailed as men in the nineteenth century. It will look at examples of female sailors and their lived experience of masculinity to reassess them as an important part of trans history. 

6:50

“I humbly entreat you”: botany, collecting, and love letters across the empire 

A work in progress of writing an eighteenth-century epistolary romance between an obsessive naturalist and the free-spirited sailor collecting plants for him. This talk considers the ramifications of  fictional actions through the archive: what gets remembered? What's forgotten? What remains ambiguous?  

7:00

#NELSONFEST: an accidental love story 

What is the research process like for someone who is trying to learn about one of the most documented men in history? With an archive of 3679 items, where do you start? This is a quick recap of some turning points in the researcher’s journey, the events that led to them, how it feels to access the collection, and the culmination of it all by retracing the steps of Nelson’s funeral with some very indulgent friends. The researcher is queer, and has approached this project with their own experiences as a lens for queer theory and the modern ways history can be revived. 

7:10

Attitudes 

This talk discusses the ongoing research and performance project ‘Attitudes’. An exploration of the life and passions of Lady Emma Hamilton by paying homage to her acclaimed ‘attitudes’, reclaiming the gaze, and giving agency to the muse and the moment. 

7:20

Questions for speakers

7:30

Break

8:00

"Why do you like these guys so much?" - the allure of polar explorers 

Many works try to answer the question of why people are drawn to the polar regions, but what about being drawn to the people who put these regions on our maps - the polar explorers themselves? This research focuses on the spectres of James Clark Ross and Francis Crozier, and attempts to pull apart the complex and compelling themes of scientific research, friendship and love in historical polar exploration. 

8:10

All Over the Place: radical mapping and museum collections 

An exploration of mindful mapmaking practices and psychogeography as tools to explore Museum and Archival collections.   

Looking through a queer and neurodivergent lens, the aim is to create new connections between spaces, objects, and experiences to unravel new stories and rethink old ones.  

8:20 

Special Guest

8:35

Questions for Speakers

8:45

Closing remarks

9:00

End