The Museum of Transology: Collecting and Curating Clothing

Public Event Series – E-J Scott, QUEERCIRCLE, Jess Bailey

11 March 2024
2:00 – 3:30 pm
Part of our public events programme 'Gender and Cloth' convened by Dr Jess Bailey
QUEERCIRCLE

Join our host Jess Bailey, UCL, and special guest E-J Scott, founder of the Museum of Transology, and go behind the scenes at one of the UK’s most significant new museum collections. Founded in 2014, the Museum of Transology preserves and exhibits Queer and Trans clothing as part of its growing collection.

Learn how the collection is shifting museum conventions and critically considering collecting practices around gender. Drawing from his work as a curator and historian of dress and fashion, he will take us behind the scenes during a pivotal moment in the collection’s current cataloguing at QUEERCIRCLE to understand how Trans stories can be amplified with cloth.

This programme is an introduction to the subject and is open to all; BA and MA students are especially encouraged to attend.

This workshop will take place at QUEERCIRCLE. All making supplies are provided free of charge and workshops are in-person only.

All workshops are wheelchair accessible.

Spaces are limited in order to create intimate discussion and instruction during making sessions; please join the waiting list if registration is full.

Image credit: (Detail) Katy Davies, Undefinable Gender, part of the Museum of Transology display at Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums, 2017. © Katy Davies / Fashion Space Gallery

About the speakers

E-J Scott is the Stage 2 and 3 Leader of the BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins (UAL). E-J’s curatorial practice segues Queer and museum theory with community engagement. E-J is deeply committed to enabling marginalised groups to protest for social justice via the production of arts and heritage programming and, in 2021, was the recipient of the UK Activist Museum Award for this work.
In February 2023, E-J launched Trans Pride UK with the ambition of building a national network of sixteen local Trans Pride collections, housed in museums across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England. This is a strategic move designed to archive Trans joy as an antidote to negative portrayals of gender diverse people in the UK, whilst shifting the broader trajectory of Pride organising from hedonism to heritage. E-J’s other creative social justice heritage projects include curating the Museum of Transology, Queer and Now (Tate), West Yorkshire Queer Stories and DUCKIE.
E-J is also increasingly interested in the Queer potentiality of digital art to disrupt how society constructs gender. In 2022, they founded the British Digital Art Network (Tate/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) to establish a national curatorial collective focused on answering the virtually impossible question – what is British digital art?
QUEERCIRCLE is a LGBTQ+ led charity working at the intersection of arts, health and social action. Their spaces include a gallery, library and project space where they host regular courses and workshops: queercircle.org.

Together with QUEERCIRCLE, Museum of Transology will prepare for the National Day of Collecting by training their members and volunteers in the practice of archiving, safeguarding and other transferable skills for the upliftment of the Trans community. One of the goals of this project is to showcase the incredible breadth of the Trans community in the UK and those who stand in solidarity by displaying and archiving thousands of placards from Trans Pride marches and events around the country. Volunteers will also be able to work with new additions to the archive from the incredible artist and performer Nando Messias.
Dr Jess Bailey (she/her) is an associate lecturer in history of art at University College London where she teaches Medieval art and methodology courses. Her published research addresses the representation of disability and gendered violence. Jess earned her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2022 with funding from the Paul Mellon Centre and Wellcome Collection among others. Passionate about the wider accessibility of art history, Jess runs a public education project, Public Library Quilts, where she uses the making of quilts to amplify social justice- informed visual and material culture research. Jess organises public art history programming such as “The People’s Quilting Bee” lectures with Dr Sharbreon Plummer and quilt fundraisers for groups including Land in Our Names and True Colors United. She is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting.