Heather Milne is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. She is co-leader of the Museum Queeries Research Group with co-panelist Angela Failler and Michelle McGeough. In addition to her research on museums, she studies experimental writing, gender, and affect. She is the author of Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics (2018) and numerous articles on poetry, affect, and gender.

Panel „Museum Queeries: Pinkwashing the Purge? The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Gay Purge Exhibit

28th May 03.30 – 05.00 pm | Heather Milne

Using the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and its forthcoming “Gay Purge” exhibit as my central example, this paper explores the ways in which cultural institutions that purport to be dedicated to human rights often foreclose meaningful critical engagement with the affective politics of human rights and diversity, and instead engage in public relations exercises that uphold existing power relations. By emphasizing human rights cases that have been “settled”, the museum relegates human rights struggles and state homophobia and transphobia to the past rather than showing that these struggles are ongoing and adopts a celebratory and congratulatory stance in regard to the nation