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  • Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display by Jennifer Tyburczy
  • Thomas R. Dunn
Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display. By Jennifer Tyburczy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016; pp. xxv + 286, $37.50 paper.

One might think a book named Sex Museums is about something new; an emerging trend in the display of sexuality signaled by the establishment of several such museums over the last few decades. Yet as Jennifer Tyburczy makes clear early in her new book, the relationships between sex and museums have existed for centuries. In fact, although these connections have rarely been explicit—except before the eyes of historical and global elites—implicitly, “all museums are sex museums” (1). In learning the often cloaked connections among sex, sexuality, and museum display at the center of Tyburczy’s book the power of this statement truly becomes clear.

Within this intriguing claim is nestled Tyburczy’s major premise: that museums and the politics of display in which they engage have long structured our understanding of sex and sexuality. To make this point, Tyburczy takes the reader through an array of compelling case studies, both ancient and modern, across six chapters. From revisiting Pompeii’s sexual ephemera long hidden away in the Secret Museum, to the elaborate “striptease” (40) unveilings of erotic art in private collections, to the ongoing culture wars over what and how sex is displayed for the viewing public, Tyburczy emphatically shows the role of museums in negotiating what it means to be sexy, sexual, sexually healthy, and “sexually modern” (47) over the last several hundred years. Although the first half of the book delves into museums that would be almost unrecognizable to most contemporary museum-patrons, the second half of the book (particularly Chapters 4 and 5) highlights relatively contemporary museums that focus on displaying sex, so-called “sex museums.” Entering these sites alongside the author, readers will find diverse display spaces for sex dotting the globe that play an increasingly central role in “track[ing] who does or does not belong in the new sexual world order” (172). Through these chapters, Tyburczy considers how sex museums can teach, provide spaces for experimentation and arousal, reorder the doing of sex in transnational flows of goods and people, problematize the [End Page 125] historical lineages of modern sex practices, and, sometimes, frighten or disappoint. By the end of this journey, Tyburczy leads readers to consider the very practical implications of displaying sex in museum settings and the queer potential that lies in such curatorship.

Throughout the book, Tyburczy draws attention to the many display practices at work in museums, all of which have something to say about sex. Although some of these practices will be familiar to readers immersed in theories of phenomenology or visual culture, Tyburczy’s investigations succeed most clearly when she makes new connections between sex display and power. A notable example of these connections occurs in Chapter 1 where the author makes a compelling case for how the “spectatorship of the female body (dead or alive)” plays a central role in establishing both the displayed and displayer, raising some provocative insights about the role of display in rethinking Lacanian psychoanalysis (14). Likewise, in Chapter 2, Sex Museums makes plain how the sexual staging of people of color, “degenerates” (89), and white female nudes in museums served as powerful reinforcements of masculinity, colonialism, and eugenics in Western societies. By Chapter 6, Tyburczy offers readers a practical tool in the form of “queer curatorship” (175), a hands-on approach to refiguring museum chronologies to trouble what we think we know about sex and to invite us to engage with sex differently. Through poignantly recounting her own struggles curating a display at the Leather Archives and Museum on a knife and whip from an 1840s southern plantation, Tyburczy offers perhaps the clearest vision in the book of how sex museums can help audiences come to grips with the complex roots of our sexual cultures, without denying them the queer sexual power we need today.

Although the book’s many arguments and case studies are compelling, Sex Museums has other equally vital features. For one, Sex Museums is...

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