More Books

Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display. By Jennifer Tyburczy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016; 296 pp.; illustrations. $105.00 cloth. $30.75 paper, e-book available.

In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy argues that museums, in their opaque and obvious displays of sex, function as venues for debating the limits of sexuality's status quo in the public sphere. Moreover, she suggests that the display of sex in museums, sites traditionally read as arbiters of Western knowledge and culture, acts as a ledger to the historical development of sexuality. This interdisciplinary work, spanning the fields of performance studies, art history/visual culture, queer theory, critical race studies, and ethnography, incorporates archival research, exhibit analysis, and participation observation, as well as queer curatorial praxis. Performance theory is crucial to Tyburczy's book—she reads museums as sites where bodies are asked to performatively move with objects on display, a form of "display choreography" embedded in queer praxis of the everyday. The first two chapters examine the exhibition and performance of sex in 19th-/ early 20th-century museums to query the public control of sexuality through controlled displays of heteronormativity. The latter chapters look to the formation of more explicit sex museums, tracing their formation across various geographic locales in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to understand the form and function of more illicit forms of sexuality and queerness for the neoliberal subject. Sex Museums is a highly creative text whose theoretically rigorous, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich prose is accessible to academic and nonacademic audiences alike.

Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement. By Nicolás Salazar Sutil. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015; 288 pp.; illustrations. $35.95 cloth, e-book available.

In Motion and Representation, Nicolás Salazar Sutil examines how movement, despite its function as a quotidian phenomenon, is deeply entrenched in social processes and human relations on multiple registers. He argues that movement is not just natural, but rather embedded in and dictated by "different historical conditions of technical and technological representation" (1). This book is structured by a two-part thesis: that the intervention of technology subverts movement's representation, and that the representation informs our sense of and the doing of movement.

Salazar Sutil emphasizes "kinetic formalism," or the representations of bodily movement structured by external units of categorization. Moreover, he incorporates the choreographic notion of a "language machine" to underscore the relationship between language and movement, or more precisely, between the concrete and abstract elements of kinetic action (e.g., the embodiment of a formal structure versus the logics and frameworks themselves). Methodologically, the book draws from media and cultural studies, visual studies, linguistics, and dance studies, offering a transdisciplinary cultural theory with unprecedented emphasis on notation, animation, and motion (5). The book is conceptually organized by frames reminiscent of animation technique: eidesis, analysis, and synthesis. Eidesis is preoccupied with the representation of movement, analysis with the materialization of concrete movement, and synthesis as a combination of the first two elements through mainly technological practices. All in all, Motion and Representation offers a wide-ranging theoretical intervention in studies of movement, signaling its dependency on formal codes of organization in an increasingly technological world.

Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching. Edited and Introduced by George Rodosthenous. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan...