Book Description

Museums have lengthy history, going back to the Renaissance Cabinets of Curiosity, and they are indices of changing fashions of perception insofar as the categories museum curators use to classify objects change over time. The major focus of Tyburczy s study is sexuality on display, which sets up, in turn, her investigation of the effects of museum display on the history of sexuality. Historical context for the museum is one of her themes (and how categories of normacly and perversity change over time), with another themes being the work of sex museums n redefining what sex means in the modern public sphere; she also folds in consideration of the pleasures and dangers of exhibiting marginalized sexual subjects (women, nonwhite races, LGBT individuals, and the like); last, she explores the paradox of asserting (as she does) that all museums are sex museums bodies move around and toward objects on display, they reshape the typical dances of museum-goers along with their preconscious motivations in visiting a museum. She proposes that explicit display or restagings of sexual artifacts provides new ways for approaching and understanding issues of desire, sexual identity, and sexual practices as they intersect with the history of the modern museum and with sexual history during the past two centuries. Her fieldwork sites are: the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, the Museum of Sex in New York, the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, and El Museo del Sexo in Mexico City. Such institutions allow Tyburczy to show how alternative sexuality (inclusive of kink, fetish, and sadomasochistic cultures) and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. There are plenty of cases here, in short, to keep the casual reader titillated and the erudite reader surprised."