ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three claims that are commonly found in contemporary museological literature. The first claim is that museums are both shaped by and shape the socio-political landscapes in which they operate and are thus implicated in systems of power and privilege. The second claim is that, despite growing sectoral concerns around inclusion, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer + stories, lives, identities, and issues continue to be largely absent in museums internationally, and this has very real material effects. The third claim is that museums can, and should, be active participants in the articulation of critically engaged and socially transformative ways of knowing, being, doing. Museum professionals are more likely to collect some things than others, to interpret, classify, and catalogue objects according to familiar paradigms, and, as Michel Foucault’s discussion of the literally fabulous taxonomy from an ancient Chinese encylopaedia shows, to never even imagine the unimaginable, to think what it is impossible to think.
