The interim director of the Smithsonian’s new American Women’s History Museum understands DNA — well at least in a metaphorical sense. Int...
The interim director of the Smithsonian’s new American Women’s History Museum understands DNA — well at least in a metaphorical sense.
Interim director Lisa Sasaki told The New York Times that “transgender women” — AKA men pretending to be women — will be included in the potential new museum which has already received millions in funding because its “inclusivity” defines what the homage to American women is all about.
“We have a job to build a museum that’s going to serve the public for a very, very long time,” Sasaki said. “From the DNA of this museum, there has been a desire to be inclusive.”
Ironically, the DNA of the actual Americans found in this new museum does not matter to Sasaki. They simply have to “identify” as a woman while having made some contribution to American society deemed historic by the powers that be with this museum.
Nonetheless, the museum has yet to receive congressional approval, but it has raised $55 million in donations from benefactors such as Melinda Gates, Bill Gates’ ex-wife, The Alice Walton Foundation, and more wealthy philanthropists.
The group already has online features up and running. It features the likes of “Sylvia Rivera” who co-founded “the militant group and youth shelter STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).” A search for conservative icon and actual woman Phyllis Schlafly yields nothing.
Sasaki, for her part, has experience in the sphere of Smithsonian greatness.
Who could forget when she launched the digital exhibition “A Day in the Queer Life of Asian Pacific America” as executive director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center? That online presentation featured the following illuminating presentations:
- Queer Elders: a series of four video shorts of queer elders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and sites in the South and Midwest U.S., curated by archivist, photographer and filmmaker Mia Nakano
- Queer Check-ins: a series of 12 video poem “check ins” by queer diasporic poets throughout the U.S. and beyond, curated by poet Franny Choi
- Queer Youth: crowd-sourced photography and short video by queer youth
- Queer Motion: crowd-sourced boomerangs exploring queer survival, heartbreak and joy set to motion
- Queer Time: a long-form essay on queer experience of time by poet Rajiv Mohabir
When and where the museum’s final location will open remains to be determined. It might lose space on the National Mall to the new American Latino Museum, according to The Times.
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