Twerking the para-museum: a queer analysis of Missy Elliott’s <i>Cool Off</i>

This conceptual article discusses how dancing and twerking bodies co-produce museum spaces, which challenge dominant conceptions of who and what matters in museums. It examines the dance performance in the music video Cool Off (2019) 1 by iconic Black female hip hop artist Missy Elliott via a systematic, critical visual analysis. Engaging with affective data that moves (us), I unpack the video’s embodied and spatial dimensions as practices of queering the museum – i.e., schdestabilizing heteronormative, hegemonic museum representations and narratives through Black and queer geographic scholarship, and critical dance studies. By remixing existing museum elements (e.g., pedestals, white cubes, golden picture frames) with twerking, rap and bright colors, Missy Elliott creates a self-directed virtual-only museum space that gives space to Black bodies that dance, move, freeze – thus claiming space for those narratives, cultural practices and legacies of Black (queer-feminist) culture that have previously been underrepresented, or been (made) absent, in museums. Missy Elliott’s museum space bursts with life, a sense of community, celebration and joy. Via the proposition of the ‘para-museum’, which imagines counter-hegemonic museums to function besides and beyond existing museum structures, I project possibilities for museums of and for the future that create and hold space for affective, embodied knowledge constituted by dancing bodies.