Exhibiting Sexualities: Pleasure, Power, and Performance in Museums

This study is the first full-length investigation of the new sex museum. It describes how museums adopt and adapt certain themes, contexts, and display technologies to exhibit sexuality for diverse museum audiences. The sex museums in this study include 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 (the Museum of Sex) in Mexico City. The analysis of sex museums shifts according to the genre of museum, the ways in which exhibits frame sex, ownership and state-recognized business status, urban location, differences in museum populations and attendance, breadth of artifacts, and technologies of display and spectatorship. This study employs archival research, exhibit analysis, participant observation, and interviews with guards, gift shop staff, ticket takers, maintenance personnel, visitors, curators, collectors, and museum owners to critique the ways in which sex museums impact contemporary sexual display culture. In sum, this study suggests that exhibiting sexualities in the museum restages sexual artifacts, and offers new ways for approaching, engaging, and understanding issues of desire, sexual identity, and sexual practice as they intersect with the history of the modern museum, sexual history in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and genealogies of taste and beauty. This study also examines the transnational circulation of sexual commodities, the globalization of sexual discourse, how sexed objects furnish desire, performances of affect that occur in and around sex museums, and how the representation of sexuality in museums communicates gendered, classed, and raced notions of sexual community.