Sex Museums

All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality-particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed-and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics-what she calls queer curatorship-for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century. Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged.Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context-from its inception to the present-marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.

"Sex Museums is a must-read for anyone who loves sex and/or museums. It is an eloquent reminder of how integral performative display of images and objects are to the world outside the museum walls. Tyburczy embarks upon an important exploration of museums as sites of norm-making and offers a valuable critique of 'choreographies of museumgoing' which explicitly or implicitly police/censor sex, or the sexually taboo. In Sex Museums, an impressive range of material is covered--from such an American classic work of dissidence like David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly to the creative, yet controversial work of Mexican artists like Rolando De La Rosa's La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe. Through these, we are able to witness Tyburczy's consistent attention to the complex interplay between race, sex, gender, and the politics of display. Sex Museums is a model of how history meets theory, how museums studies can meet sexuality studies, and how performance can meet the archive--producing a rich terrain of truly original thought and methodological innovation. With Tyburczy's eye and careful theorization, she creates her own museum with careful curatorial notes; a rich transnational-transdisciplinary space we are all lucky to explore."-- "Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing", "Sex Museums is a queer manifesto for museum studies. Curating a grand tour of the museum as the West's privileged space of display, Tyburczy excavates a genealogy of the recent culture wars while also attending to transnational circuits of capital, sex, and tourism. Offering the intriguing possibility that 'any museum can be a sex museum, ' this work reorients the history of exhibition in compelling new ways."-- "Molly McGarry, author of Ghosts of Futures Past", "Merging examinations of institutional history, curatorial selection, visitor observations, political commentary, architecture and soundscapes, pedagogical materials, sexual tourism, and the phenomenology of touch, Tyburczy takes the reader on a tour of how and where meanings are made and inculcated. . .Tyburczy adds significantly to this body of literature through her study of sex and eroticism as displayed in museums in her important book Sex Museums, the first of its kind."-- "Women's Review of Books", "Tyburczy's Sex Museums hits the sweet hot spot between sexuality studies and museum studies to offer a smart analysis of the politics of the erotic in the public sphere. Read it and teach it if you love art, appreciate the power of representation to change our understandings of the world, and care about the place of sexual and gender minorities in civic space."-- "Susan Stryker, director, Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona", "[This] wide-ranging book offers multiperspectival analyses of sex in museums. . . . Engaging with research across a variety of disciplines (museology, performance studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory in particular) alongside a confident autoethnographic approach, Tyburczy also deploys other strategies, such as interviews, descriptions of curatorial practice, and sections of performative writing. . . . Not only, then, is this book a vital contribution to scholarship on the censorship of sex and sexuality that has long been politically important to theatre and performance studies scholarship, but it also contributes innovative and compelling methodologies for the work of political resistance so urgently demanded by our extraordinary times." --Theatre Journal "Susan Bennett"

Jennifer Tyburczy is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.