Angela Failler Angela Failler is Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory, and  Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Her research focuses on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with the difficult knowledge of historical traumas and injustices, including their ongoing/after effects. She co-leads the  Museum Queeries research group and is Director of the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies  (CRiCS). With Drs. Chandrima Chakraborty and Amber Dean she is editor of Remembering Air  India: The Art of Public Mourning (University of Alberta Press, 2017).

Panel „Museum Queeries“: A Gay Coin Exchange at the Museum: Trading (on) Queer Currency and  Homonational Pride 

Angela Failler

In May 2019 the Canadian Museum for Human Rights held an event to celebrate the nationwide release of a $1-coin commemorating 50 years since the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada. Interrupting the fanfare, local Two-Spirit and Indigenous queer community leaders gathered outside of the museum in protest. My paper considers this event to open a conversation on the limited framework of inclusivity/inclusion as a strategy for engaging diverse communities through public history institutions, taking seriously the protestors’ resistance to the museum’s trading on/in certain expressions of queer currency and homonational pride.