Preface
1. For the article that brought Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly and the NPG exhibit to the attention of Republican congressmen, see Penny Starr, “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts,” CNSNews.com, November 29, 2010, http://cnsnews.com/news/article/smithsonian-christmas-season-exhibit-features-ant-covered-jesus-naked-brothers-kissing. The title of this article is followed by a warning label that reads: “WARNING: This story contains graphic photographs of items on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.” For more on warning signs, see chapter 3 below. On the Wojnarowicz controversy, see also “Smithsonian Hosts Anti-Christian Exhibit,” Catholic League, November 30, 2010, http://www.catholicleague.org/smithsonian-hosts-anti-christian-exhibit.
2. Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992).
3. Mike Valensky, “U.S. Representative John Boehner Is Now a Curator,” New York Magazine, November 30, 2011, http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/11/us_representative_john_boehner.html.
4. Association of Art Museum Directors, “AAMD Statement on Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery,” December 3, 2010, http://www.aamd.org/newsroom (now defunct). After it was issued, the statement met with harsh criticism and was removed. Its erasure provides another example of how various players in scenarios of censorship related to queer-themed displays seek to cover their tracks in the aftermath. For a criticism of the statement that also reprints it, see Tyler Green, “AAMD Misses Mark on Smithsonian Controversy,” Modern Art Notes, December 3, 2010, http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2010/12/aamd-misses-mark-on-smithsonian-controversy.
5. College Art Association News, “Statements on the National Portrait Gallery from People and Organizations,” comp. Christopher Howard, December 7, 2010, http://www.collegeart.org/news/2010/12/07/statements-on-the-national-portrait-gallery-from-other-organizations.
6. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “Warhol Foundation Responds to Censorship at National Portrait Gallery,” December 9, 2010, http://www.warholfoundation.org/foundation/34_detail.html.
7. Wojnarowicz’s exact intention regarding the “final cut” of the video footage was and is still unknown. A Fire in My Belly thus becomes a malleable object without an original. Every subsequent presentation of the footage is based on conjecture as to Wojnarowicz’s aspirational intentions. For example, from the extant raw footage, the media production professional Bart Everly (with the permission of the Wojnarowicz estate and the Hide/Seek curators) recut and edited a four-minute version from nearly twenty-one available minutes to reflect a Smithsonian-specific time constraint. Everly remixed the footage with a soundtrack derived from Wojnarowicz’s own recording of an ACT UP demonstration and well-known chants such as “Black, white, gay, straight, AIDS does not discriminate” and “Hey-hey, ho-ho, homophobia’s got to go” can clearly be heard throughout. For Hide/Seek, the curators framed this reorganized audio and visual imagery as an abstract portrait of those who had died of AIDS with a particular homage to the artist Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz’s colleague and lover who passed away in 1987.
8. While some specially trained guards in a few museums carry concealed weapons, the batons and guns in the Hide/Seek galleries were clearly visible. Whether and for what purposes guards would carry and use guns in museums are questions that open up a larger debate about violence in museums and also about the role of the museum guard as a particular segment of the American labor market that is often populated by people of color. Historically, the shift to arming museum guards is often seen as a necessary response to regime change and the vulnerability of national treasures. For example, in 1979, during the fall of the shah in Iran, the threat to Tehran’s museums prompted some officials to send students with guns to guard them. In other words, guards openly carry guns in museums as a performance of intimidation and only in response to extreme circumstances. That the threats directed at the NPG were perceived as a qualifying situation crystallizes the high stakes for exhibiting diverse sexualities in museums. For more on the debate about guns in museums, see Christopher Knight, “Under the Gun Is No Way to View Art,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-armedguards4-2008jun04,0,6367581.story. See also David Liston, Museum Security and Protection: A Handbook for Cultural Heritage Institutions (London: Routledge, 1993).
9. In the wake of the withdrawal of A Fire in My Belly at the NPG, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York purchased and showed the footage. In an interview for the New Museum’s 2012 exhibition We Who Feel Differently, Jonathan D. Katz, a cocurator of Hide/Seek, explained that MoMA became interested in A Fire in My Belly only after it had become internationally famous owing to the controversy. “The museum [MoMA] was never interested in my exhibition, in fact was not interested in doing anything queer at all,” he noted. “I would say there is a shortage of queer discursive frames, and until there is a greater acknowledgement of the discursive import of sexuality it will not matter how many works by queer artists museums buy. It is also the case that because of this reign of silence, we have actually falsified American art history.” As a result of the controversy, A Fire in My Belly became lucrative to an institution with a poor track record for displaying not only queer art but also art made by women and people of color, as the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist performance troupe, has so acutely shown. Through MoMA’s performance of collecting, the meaning of A Fire in My Belly changes yet again, and, in the future of its display, MoMA may further alter its meaning by choosing whether to exhibit it in ways that evacuate its connection to queer sexual history. See Carlos Motta, “An Interview with Jonathan D. Katz,” We Who Feel Differently, February 8, 2011, http://www.wewhofeeldifferently.info/interview.php?interview=102. See also Mark Joseph Stern, “Is MoMA Putting Artists Back in the Closet?” Slate, February 26, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/02/26/moma_closets_jasper_johns_and_robert_rauschenberg_why.html.
Introduction
1. James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219. For another definition of contact zones—as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical power relations”—see Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 33–40, 34. While Pratt does not discuss museums, I find her term contact zones useful for questioning the forms of community that museums often take for granted.
2. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 6.
3. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: An Installation, ed. Lisa Graziose Corrin (Baltimore: The Contemporary; New York: New Press, 1994).
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 37 (see generally 36–49).
5. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 225. While the terms Wunderkammern and curiosity cabinets are often used interchangeably, Celeste Olalquiaga pinpoints curiosity cabinets as later sites in the transition between the Wunderkammern and the modern museum. For Olalquiaga, Wunderkammern refers to those immense early collections of rare and diverse objects displayed for reasons of puzzlement, awe, and decor, whereas curiosity cabinets refers to privileged spaces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where the collections of the Wunderkammern were dismantled and organized within strict taxonomies for scientific purposes with the legible intention of mastering and controlling nature through labeling and categorization. Celeste Olalquiaga, “Object Lesson/Transitional Object,” Cabinet Magazine, no. 20 (Winter 2005–6), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/olalquiaga.php.
6. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 311–30.
7. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2000); Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin, introduction to “Queer Futures,” ed. Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin, special issue, Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 1–9; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Susan Stryker, “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity,” Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 145–57; Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
8. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
9. Tracy C. Davis, “Performing and the Real Thing in the Postmodern Museum,” TDR/The Drama Review 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 15–40; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture; Vivian Patraka, “Spectacles of Suffering: Performing Presence, Absence, and Historical Memory at U.S. Holocaust Museums,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 89–106; Sandra L. Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 617–37; Ramón Rivera-Servera, “Exhibiting Voice/Narrating Migration: Performance-Based Curatorial Practice in Azúcar! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 2 (April 2009): 131–48.
10. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
11. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2, 21; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.
12. Anjali R. Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–12; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
13. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 117–21.
15. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997), 7. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); and Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
16. David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), 2.
17. Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown, eds., Geographies of Sexualities (London: Ashgate, 2007), 2.
18. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10.
19. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 159.
20. Ibid., 157.
21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–230.
22. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Representing the Nation: A Reader/Histories, Heritage and Museums, ed. Jessica Evans (New York: Routledge, 1999), 332–61. This essay responds to Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins, which Bennett critiques as too quickly collapsing the museum into the same field of disciplining power as the carceral archipelago.
23. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex”; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 297–98.
24. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 4.
25. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 140.
26. Beatriz [Paul B.] Preciado, Pornotopia: Arquitectura y sexualidad en “Playboy” durante la guerra fría (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010).
27. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 68.
28. Ibid.
29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
30. Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.
31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
32. Betty Dodson, Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving (1974; New York: Random House, 1996); Deep Throat, directed by Gerard Damiano (Miami: Bryanston Pictures, 1973), DVD, 61 minutes. In the case of exhibiting Deep Throat, a sex museum might mention but would be less likely to explore the connection between the name of the film and the pseudonym of the anonymous informant who leaked information about the involvement of President Richard Nixon’s administration in the Watergate scandal. While, like all museums, sex museums are political projects, they often avoid displays that involve politicians. One notable example was the Museum of Sex’s 2006 display of a resin bust of Hilary Clinton by the sculptor Daniel Edwards. In a low-cut floral dress, and showing ample cleavage, the bust was inspired by a quote from Sharon Stone, who had said that voters would never vote for Clinton as president until they moved “past her sexuality.”
33. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 1.
34. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 146.
35. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Janet Halley, “‘Like Race’ Arguments,” in What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 40–73; and Siobhan Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ 11, no. 3 (2005): 335–70.
36. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corp./Penguin, 1987), 37–64; Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 68. Schneider connects the genealogy of how the female body became the site of perspectivalism in art with emerging contemporary practices in medicine and capitalism.
37. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
38. Lyle Massey, “The Anatomy of Gender,” http://anatomyofgender.northwestern.edu. Massey’s 2006 exhibition at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art titled The Anatomy of Gender: Arts of the Body in Early Modern Europe explored how, even after death, bodies were bound by the same gendered constraints as were the living.
39. Julie V. Hansen, “Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (December 1996): 663–79.
40. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 193–94.
41. On the ways in which gender as a binary system becomes a constitutive element in the emergence of liberal political structure in the context of the United States, see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). For a discussion of how Western feminism emerged within this historical period, see Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine, 2002), 45–121. The term gender, however, was not invented until 1955, when the sexologist John Money first used it. See Terry Goldie, The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). For a critique of the ways in which Money and other sexologists used gender in the service of inventing pathologies like “gender identity disorder,” see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Social Text 29 (November 1991): 18–27.
42. For a critical analysis of the hard core through pornographic film, see Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
43. Davis, “Performing and the Real Thing in the Postmodern Museum,” 15.
44. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums,” in The New Museology, ed. Peter Vargo (London: Reaktion, 1989), 22–40, 36.
45. The Ladies’ Museum of Anatomy Catalogue (1869) cited in Davis, “Performing and the Real Thing in the Postmodern Museum,” 32–35. See also Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
46. Gretchen Worden, ed., Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (New York: Blast, 2002), 21.
47. Slave women were thought by Sims and his colleagues to be more durable and pathologically abnormal in their sexuality, thus rendering them capable of withstanding unanesthetized operations. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday Broadway, 2007), 2, 54–73, 101–3, 235, 256, 349; Kapsalis, Public Privates, 31–60.
48. Kapsalis, Public Privates, 81–112. See also Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1985): 204–42.
49. For a description of the “Rethinking Sex” conference, see Jennifer Tyburczy, “The Time Has Come to (Re)think Sex,” Criticism 51 no. 2 (2009): 355–66.
50. This is not an isolated event. In another gallery of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the only display that included women revolved around reproduction and fetuses, thus positioning fetal reproduction as women’s contribution to science and industry. See Catherine Cole, “Sex and Death on Display: Women, Reproduction and Fetuses at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry,” TDR/The Drama Review 37, no. 1 (1993): 43–60.
51. For the history of displaying the vagina as a cavernous mystery, see Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 66–87. Freud wrote: “We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.” The phrase dark continent simultaneously transforms white women and women of color into geographic spaces that are murky, deep, and incomprehensible. Freud borrowed it from the African explorer John Rowlands Stanley, who described his expeditions in similar terms. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis: An Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1926; New York: Norton, 1950), 212.
52. Kapsalis, Public Privates, 59.
53. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), xiv. See also Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledges and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
54. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 11.
55. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 7.
56. Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, 225.
57. Rita Felski, introduction to Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura L. Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 1–9, 4.
58. Ibid.
59. While many of these archives—such as the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco (founded in 1985), the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, NY (founded in 1973), and the ONE archieves in Los Angeles (founded in 1952)—incorporate small gallery spaces for viewing themed displays (some of which incorporate an explicitly erotic or sexual component), they more often function as sites for activist work, academic study, and community gathering centers. The GLBT Historical Society opened the first LGBT museum in the United States in 2010.
60. Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: Rethinking Sexuality in History,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Penguin, 1990), 54–66, 55–56, 57.
61. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17. Krauss primarily unpacks the economic trends of the art market and their influence on art museums. For a follow-up to Krauss’s notion of the late capitalist museum from an anthropological perspective, see Saloni Mathur, “Museums and Globalization,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 697–708.
62. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776/1781; New York: Everyman’s Library, 2010). Gibbon attributed the fall of Rome to divided rulership, the abuse of Christianity, the expansion of the barbarians, the loss of Roman military power, and a decline in public morality. See also Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 23–50; Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987); and Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, ed. Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp, and Joanne Bernstein (London: Merrell, in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 2007).
63. Seduced, 26–29.
64. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, 20. For the relationship between urban prostitution, race, and visuality, see Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.” On urban secular reform, class, and sex work in the nineteenth century, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1982; New York: Knopf, 1986), 171–93. See also Vern L. Bullough, “Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England,” in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexual Behavior during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 61–74.
65. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, 31.
66. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 2–13. Williams characterizes pornography as a “body genre” that, along with melodrama and horror films, invites the mimetic reenactment of what the spectator views onscreen. The implicit invitation of the body genres to involuntarily mimic with the body what the body is watching exceeds the normative frame of most narrative cinema; this inevitable or encouraged embodied response is what relegates the body genres (inclusive of porn, melodrama, and horror) to inferior categories of cinema according to the standards of critics.
67. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, 15, 11.
68. Ed Jacob, “The House of Secret Treasures: Japan’s Sex Museums and Festivals,” in Everything You Know about Sex Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to the Extremes of Human Sexuality (and Everything in Between), ed. Russ Kick (New York: Disinformation, 2005), 78–81. See also Kyoichi Tsusuki, Sperm Palaces (Tokyo: Aspect Corp, 2001).
69. Jacob, “The House of Secret Treasures,” 81.
70. Marianna Beck and Jack Hafferkamp, “The Era of Sex Museums,” Libido: The Journal of Sex and Sensibility, vol. 8, no. 1 (2001). The electronic publication Libido is no longer available online.
71. Janice M. Epp, Ph.D. clinical sexologist, email message to author, May 9, 2008.
72. Tracy C. Davis, “Theatricality and Civil Society,” in Theatricality: Theatre and Performance Theory, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127–55, 128.
73. On performative writing, see Della Pollock, “Performing Writing,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 73–103. On thick description, see Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973), 3–30.
74. Kelly Dennis, Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 159–82; Amy L. Levin, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Museums (New York: Routledge, 2010); John Fraser and Joe E. Heimlich, eds., “Where Is Queer?” special issue, Museums and Social Issues, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008); Robert Ridinger, “Things Visible and Invisible: The Leather Archives and Museum,” Journal of Homosexuality 43, no. 1 (2002): 1–9; Patrik Steorn, “Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice,” Curator: The Museum Journal 55, no. 3 (July 2012): 355–65; Jennifer Tyburczy, “Perverting the Museum: The Politics and Performance of Sexual Artifacts,” in Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 146–70, and “All Museums Are Sex Museums,” Radical History Review 113 (Spring 2012): 199–211; Susan Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Gerard Koskovich, “Displaying the Queer Past: Purposes, Publics, and Possibilities at the GLBT History Museum,” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 61–78; Don Romesburg, “Presenting the Queer Past: A Case for the GLBT History Museum,” Radical History Review 120 (Fall 2014): 131–44; Katherine Sender, “Disorienting Methods: Some Challenges for Transnational Communication Research in Sexuality,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013); 2521–32.
Chapter One
1. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 83–242.
2. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 20.
3. Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990), and Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); André Lepecki, “Choreography as Apparatus of Capture,” TDR/The Drama Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 119–23; André Lepecki and Ric Allsopp, “Editorial: On Choreography,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 13, no. 1 (2008): 1–6.
4. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
5. Amelia Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History,” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 71–90.
6. The cultivation of taste vis-à-vis display technologies and choreographies also functions as a method of producing and reproducing class hierarchies and certain affective relationships to sex objects. See Dennis, Art/Porn.
7. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, 31; Williams, “Film Bodies.”
8. Bourdieu, Distinction.
9. Berger, Ways of Seeing.
10. Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 65–122; Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2001), 21–39 (“Coke as Objet Petit A”).
11. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance.
12. My theatrical retelling of Lacan’s unveiling L’Origine du monde is culled from archival traces mentioned in the following primary and secondary texts: L’origine du monde, directed by Jean-Paul Fargier, Gustave Courbet DVD, 1996 (Réunion des musées nationaux/Arte vidéo coproduction), 26 minutes; Thierry Savatier, El origen del mundo: Historia de un cuadro de Gustave Courbet, trans. Olaya González Dopazo (Cenero: Trea, 2009); Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8–18; Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), esp. 355, 184; and James Lord, Picasso and Dora (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993). The material in quotations is directly from Roudinesco’s biography, and any quotations that I attribute to Lacan were actually spoken by Sylvia Bataille or Maurice Kruk.
13. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63.
14. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 37–64.
15. According to personal email correspondence with the Client Service agent at the museum (2 Nov 2006), it is one of the best-selling postcards in the gift shop. Eric Jouvenaux, Service Culturel Musée d’Orsay, email message to author, November 2, 2006. Alternately, the social life of the painting on the Internet, more specifically when posted on the social networking site Facebook, has met with censorship. The Copenhagen artist Frode Steinicke posted the image to his page, and Facebook disabled his account citing a violation of decency standards. A Facebook spokesperson later restored the account and in an apology (given after the New York Times printed the story) claimed that the “lifelike portrayal” of the painting “fooled our reviewers.” Apparently they thought it was a photograph, a historically more suspect art genre. For more on this story and its aftermath, see Ben Davis, “No Friend of the Nude: A Blushing Facebook Wages a Campaign against Courbet and au Naturale Art,” ArtInfo, February 24, 2011, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37052/no-friend-of-the-nude-a-blushing-facebook-wages-a-campaign-against-courbet-and-au-naturale-art.
16. Quoted in Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment,” 72.
17. L’origine du monde, directed by Jean-Paul Fargier. See also Francis Haskell, “A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 1 (1982): 40–47. For an account of Khalil Bey’s life that distinguishes itself from the ways in which Western literature has depicted him and his values, see Deniz Türker, “The Oriental Flaneur: Khalil Bey and the Cosmopolitan Experience” (master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007).
18. Linda Nochlin, “Courbet’s L’origine du monde: The Origin without an Original,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 76–86, 77. In February 2013, the French weekly magazine Paris Match reported that the Courbet expert Jean-Jacque Fernier had discovered an unsigned painting of a woman’s head that he believed was cut off from the L’origine du monde. Even if Fernier is correct, whether Courbet actually painted the woman’s head as contiguous with L’origine du monde or as a separate painting that was later removed (by Bey?) from L’origine du monde remains a mystery. “‘L’origine du monde’ de Courbet a enfin un visage: Les preuves,” Paris Match, February 7, 2013, http://www.parismatch.com/Culture/Art/L-Origine-du-Monde-de-Courbet-a-enfin-un-visage-Les-preuves-103377.
19. Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins, 13.
20. The history of sexual display is, as I will discuss in chapter 2, an emotional history, one in which anger, and in some instances violence, plays a prominent role as an agent of deemphasizing arousal and desire.
21. Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Continuum, 2006), 153–54. Relevant to my next chapter, a section of which focuses on Mary Richardson’s vandalism of Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus, Scruton also discussed how Velázquez avoids this conundrum in his painting by turning the model away from the viewer, creating a spectator experience of the gaze that is always oscillating between the woman (the face, which is partially concealed except for its reflection in the mirror) and the objects of desire (the genitals, which are concealed). Scruton makes fun of Richardson, whom he characterizes as a “prudish suffragette, who poked at Venus’s rump with an umbrella” and claimed that she defended her act by saying “because it [the painting] is stupid!” In the next chapter, I pay closer attention to the details of this event as well as to Richardson’s motivations for vandalizing the painting.
22. A different but equally erotic exhibition was choreographed for a 2007 Courbet retrospective at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. This exhibition used a rotunda layout to present L’origine du monde between the paintings that were previously used to hide and reveal it: Le Chateau Blonay, which I mention later in the chapter, and the woodcut panel made by André Masson. In the Grand Palais, these paintings were further housed in a round pavilion at the center of the room dedicated to Courbet’s nudes. John Golding’s review of the exhibition for the New York Review of Books speculated: “[This layout] presumably . . . allow[ed] the guards to deny access to parties of schoolchildren. This had the unfortunate effect of not allowing one to stand far enough back to fully appreciate the splendors of the two great paintings, the nudes of 1866, mentioned above.” Against this assertion I would of course argue that the labyrinthine layout and the winding, circular choreography that patrons were made to perform as well as the intentional gathering of people into an intimate mass when viewing the L’origine du monde represented a postmodern approach to the display of the painting that repeated with a parodic, hyperbolic difference the ways in which the painting had previously been displayed. Another review, this one by Mary Morton for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, described the rotunda as having “a hot house, peep show element in the Paris installation, which had these pictures set in a circular gallery, in the center of which were more circular walls containing the Origin of the World, the most celebrated beaver-shot in the history of painting, placed within the context of contemporary pornographic photography of similar headless, armless, legless compositions.” John Golding, “The Born Rebel Artist,” New York Review of Books 55, no. 2 (February 14, 2008), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/feb/14/the-born-rebel-artist; Mary Morton, review of the exhibition “Gustave Courbet,” Nineteenth-Century Art WorldWide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn08/85-gustave-courbet.
23. See, e.g., Gérard Zwang, Le sexe de la femme (Paris: La Musardine, 1997). This book, illustrated by the author’s brother Jacques Zwang, begins with an anatomy lesson, then moves to the cultural and social impact of female genitalia, before transitioning to the moral take on the vulva, and finally ends with a glossary of terms for the female genitalia.
24. Quoted in Savatier, El origen del mundo, 175; also translated from the French in Fargier’s film.
25. Savatier, El origen del mundo, 130–38.
26. Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment,” 83; Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A.”
27. Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A,” 69–70, 73.
28. According to Lord’s account, Picasso and Jacqueline Rocque would become lovers around the time of this event; Rocque and Picasso were married, Rocque becoming his second wife, in 1961. See Lord, Picasso and Dora, 198. This description of the painting’s display was probably only one of very few instances that occurred before Cuny alerted the cinema audience to the whereabouts of the painting in 1967.
29. Ibid., 204.
30. Nochlin, “Courbet’s L’origine du monde,” 77.
31. Quoted in Jones, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment,” 72.
32. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 23, 25.
33. Ibid., 37–39.
34. Nochlin quoted in Dennis, Art/Porn, 72.
35. Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 6–32. Hansen puts forth the idea that women can also view male characters as erotic objects of desire rather than simply identifying with the female persona of a film.
36. See, e.g., Patricia Cronin’s Untitled No. 119 (1995), l’origine de la guerre by Orlan (1989), Tanja Ostojic’s Untitled/After Courbet (L´origine du monde) (2004), Rosemarie Trockel’s Animality (2012), and Deborah De Robertis’s guerrilla performance Miroir de l’Origine.
37. Press release provided by Andrea Fraser. Andrea Fraser, email message to author, July 20, 2011.
38. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 95–114 (“Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk”). This text corresponds to both a performance and a film by the same name. In using resonance and wonder to describe what art museum or gallery display can evoke in its visitors, I draw from Stephen Greenblatt’s proposal of two distinct models for the exhibition of works of art. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43, no. 4 (January 1990): 11–34.
39. Little Frank and His Carp, directed and performed by Andrea Fraser, Tate Modern Collection, 2001, purchased 2007, 6 minutes.
40. It is also relevant to my argument about embodiment to juxtapose the titles of these two artworks. In the case of Courbet’s L’origine du monde, the monumentality of naming the representation as a world origin indicates a certain aggrandizing gesture that is normative to nineteenth-century art production as well as the masculine canon of art. Fraser’s choice to title her film Untitled directly confronts the monumentality of art titles. Tobias Vogt’s cleverly titled book Untitled examines the origins of the title Untitled. In it, Vogt discusses the reasons why the abstract expressionists used un-titles to question the function of the title and to refuse the traditional naming of art. According to him: “This had to do with an interest in creating an American avant-garde (against European surrealism in New York during World War II), the idea of a new beginning, the idea of the sublime (as the unspeakable), and the rejection of any marketing (paintings were explained by means of their title in magazines and newspapers, and these painters refused this kind of help for any interpretation).” Tobias Vogt, email message to the author, March 7, 2012. See also Tobias Vogt, Untitled: Zur Karriere unbetitelter Kunst in der jüngsten Moderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006). Fraser’s choice to name her film Untitled certainly connects to this history of questioning the monumentality of the aggrandized title, represented par excellence in L’origine du monde; Vogt’s analysis also leads me to suggest that in naming her film Untitled Fraser is also consciously playing with psychoanalytic constructions of spectatorship and language while at the same time pushing back against the tendency to enfold her work within the art market. This latter point is emphasized in her creation of a film and not a painting or some other two- or three-dimensional work that can more readily be collected and possessed by a museum or a private collector. There are purportedly only five copies of Untitled in circulation.
41. Gregg Bordowitz and Andrea Fraser, “What Do We Want from Art Anyway? A Conversation,” email correspondence, June 2004, carlosmotta.com/artwurl/pdf/INT026.pdf.
42. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 172.
43. Ibid., 108.
44. Bordowitz and Fraser, “What Do We Want from Art Anyway?”
45. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” For the “whore” quote, see Jerry Saltz, “Critiqueus Interruptus,” Village Voice, February 13, 2007, http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-02-13/art/critiqueus-interruptus.
46. Fraser, like Piper, is often read as white. She is in fact biracial and credits her mother, Carmen de Monteflores, whom she calls in Museum Highlights a “feminist, a lesbian, and a woman of color,” with inspiring her to think about the relations between objects. Fraser, Museum Highlights, xxi.
47. Jerry Saltz, “Super Theory Woman,” Artnet.com, 2004, http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz7-8-04.asp.
48. John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, “Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound,” TDR/The Drama Review 40, no. 3 (1996): 102–11.
49. As of May 2014, I learned from the Petzel Gallery that it no longer represents Andrea Fraser.
50. Andrea Fraser, email message to the author, March 20, 2012.
51. Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, n.d., http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/poplife. When Fraser presented a scholarly autoretrospective on her career at the College Art Association in 2012, her PowerPoint presentation included stills from Untitled, but she quickly clicked over them and did not discuss them. When I asked her about this choice, she responded in an email: “I always discuss Untitled when I give longer and more general lectures about my work. When I planned my talk at the CAA, I think I wanted to focus more on lecture-based and more academic-like work, to address the context.” Throughout the entire period I conducted research for this book, the idea that the inclusion of explicit sex upsets or forecloses the academic aspect of a presentation or performance arose in every instance in which I spoke to an artist or a curator who experienced some backlash for exhibiting sex in public.
52. For example, Linda Williams describes the striptease ritual as the “spectacular mime of sexual relations that takes the audience member as imaginary partner.” Williams, Hard Core, 77. In comparison to Fraser, Lacan more faithfully fulfills the role of striptease performer as he undresses L’origine du monde; in the organizing philosophy of striptease as a genre of dance, the slow reveal and eye contact are central insofar as the latter component invites the spectator into an imaginary sexual relation with the moving body, or, in the case of Lacan, the static painted body, on display. Fraser never makes eye contact with the camera lens in Untitled and thus invites onlookers into a decision-making process about whether and how they will become the erotic and potentially unethical voyeur. While in both scenarios the process of sexual excitation of striptease as a choreography depends on the alternation between exposure and concealment, Fraser’s exposure is visible only to the spectator; it does not, as in the case of Lacan, invite the spectator into a relation with her body. To enter the process of sexual excitation in Untitled, viewers must forgo their active sexual relation in the scene or impose a status of imaginary partner onto Untitled by usurping either the role of the more submissive male performer or the more dominant female performer.
Chapter Two
1. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex.”
2. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 41.
3. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 37–64.
4. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
5. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: J. Murray, 1956).
6. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
7. Couple in a Cage was also performed at Covent Garden in London, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Whitney Museum’s biennial in New York, the Australian Museum of Natural History, and, finally, in Argentina at the invitation of the Fundación Banco Patricios in Buenos Aires.
8. Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 61; Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The Artist as Criminal,” TDR/The Drama Review 40, no. 1 (1996): 112–18, 112. I base my description of Couple in a Cage on these articles and the film documentation of the performance, which depicts a composite picture of all the museums Fusco and Gómez-Peña visited. The Couple in a Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, directed by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia (Authentic Documentary Productions, 1993), VHS.
9. Diana Taylor, “A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s ‘Couple in the Cage,’” TDR/The Drama Review 42, no. 2 (1998): 160–75, 165.
10. Fusco, English Is Broken Here, 57, quoted in Taylor, “A Savage Performance,” 165.
11. Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 80.
12. Case quoted in Taylor, “A Savage Performance,” 166.
13. For another performance that works with the freak show format, see Corpo/Illicito: The Post-Human Society featuring La Pocha Nostra, a band of international performance artists that includes Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, among others.
14. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 62, 71.
15. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 26.
16. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 66.
17. Ibid., 82.
18. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 56.
19. Quoted in Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 270.
20. Fashion historians have suggested that the exaggerated drawings of Baartman’s body may have contributed to the Victorian craze for bustles. The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, “The Hottentot Venus,” directed by Zola Maseko (Icarus Films, 1998), VHS, 52 minutes.
21. Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,” in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 60–76.
22. Deceased men and their body parts were rarely kept, stored, or displayed. When they were, the emphasis always fell on the brain and the cranium and never the pelvis or genitalia. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 203.
23. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 27–28.
24. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 27.
25. Jatti Bredekamp, “The Politics of Human Remains: The Case of Sarah Baartman,” in Human Remains and Museum Practice, ed. Jack Lohman and Katherine Goodnow (London: Unesco/Museum of London, 2006), 25–32, 27. Bredekamp cites the Second Session of the French National Assembly of February 21, 2002, Discussion of the Bill Adopted by the Senate: Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwarztenberg Speech, Official Translation, 3.
26. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections on Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), 292.
27. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 89. See also Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”
28. Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, 301.
29. Fusco, English Is Broken Here, 50.
30. The Times, December 14, 1905, quoted in Nead, The Female Nude, 36.
31. Information on the provenance of the painting is gleaned from Gridley McKim-Smith, “The Rhetoric of Rape, the Language of Vandalism,” Woman’s Art Journal 23, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2002): 29–36; Nead, The Female Nude, 34–42; and Lars Kiel Bertelsen and Klaus Christensen, “Political Vandalism, Art and Gender,” KVINFO, November 28, 2004, http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/674/article/29.
32. “Miss Richardson’s Statement,” The Times, March 11, 1914.
33. Nead, The Female Nude, 35.
34. Constance Classen, ed., The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
35. Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 895–914, 896.
36. Tina Howe, Museum: A Drama (London: Samuel French, 1979), 9.
37. Austin is discussed in Janice Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 21–140.
38. David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1985), 8.
39. McKim-Smith, “The Rhetoric of Rape,” 29.
40. The debate about the potential sexual and love relationships between suffragette women in England in the early twentieth century has centered on the work of June Purvis and Martin Pugh. Pugh’s suggestion that suffragettes engaged in “lesbian love trysts” has been characterized as “masculinist,” “misogynistic and puerile.” I did not interpret the sections of Pugh’s book that explore the possible love connections between suffragettes in this light. Jane Purvis, however, was indignant about his suppositions, but whether her anger stemmed from what she saw as a misreading of the diaries in the archive or the possibility of homosexuality among the suffragettes is unclear. See June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London: Penguin, 2002).
41. Pugh, The Pankhursts, 211.
42. McKim-Smith, “The Rhetoric of Rape,” 32.
43. Nead, The Female Nude, 41.
44. Sorrel Bentinck and Mary Richardson, “Memories of a Militant Suffragette,” BBC Radio, first broadcast April 23, 1961, 29 minutes, 30 seconds, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/suffragettes/8321.shtml.
45. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 4.
46. Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog, 2004), 101–11.
47. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 1–2.
48. Hilda Kean, “Some Problems of Constructing and Reconstructing a Suffragette’s Life: Mary Richardson, Suffragette, Socialist and Fascist,” Women’s History Review 7, no. 4 (1998): 475–93.
49. This vignette is derived from “Cubists Depart; Students Joyful,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 17, 1913; “A Line-O’Type or Two,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 18, 1913; John Elderfield, Pleasuring Painting: Matisse’s Feminine Representations (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996); and Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Joseph H. Hirshorn Foundation, 1963). Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago provided both clippings.
50. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 41, 36.
51. Milton Brown, The Armory Show in Retrospect (Amherst, MA: Amherst College, 1958).
52. The unthreatening postures, looks, and dazed consciousnesses of female nudes rigidly framed femininity and female sexuality in ways that exceeded art. John Berger discussed the proliferation of female nudes on gallery walls as well as in other visual media and venues where display and representation dominated modes of showing. He argued that the redundant display spectacle of the idealized nude female body does not have an honorary function; instead, the performativity of displaying such female nudes, not only in art but everywhere, has had a profound limiting effect on the range of sexual performances that women can acceptably perform. In other words, the ubiquity of female nudes creates a category of monstrous, obscene thingness filled with active and even dominant sexual women. Critiquing the ways in which women’s bodies are represented through images, Berger argues: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47. Kenneth Clark situated a debate that juxtaposed “the naked and the nude” in terms of questions about twentieth-century sexual morality. According to Clark: “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some sort of embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.” While Clark goes on to try and formally distinguish between the naked and the nude, ultimately arguing that the former is less refined, more vulgar, less elevated and elevating than the latter, his initial and lingering attention to feeling, particularly embarrassment and shame, communicates a highly subjective, historically contingent, but consistently repositioned fear of the chaotic sexual body. For him, the nude is an idea and a composite idealization (a veritable Frankensteinian composite of perfect body parts), not an imitation of the (white female) sexual body that should always arouse (the heterosexual male), but not too much. It is on the basis of feeling excessively sexual that Clark most definitively, albeit vaguely, distinguished between the naked and the nude. Clark, The Nude, 1 (quote), 6. For Berger, the dichotomy of the naked and the nude that Clark set up was damaging when implemented to achieve the perfect aesthetic form. Instead, Berger used the distinction to describe nakedness as a process, a performance, marked by movement, activity, and banality, or the performance of the everyday, unairbrushed sexual subject. The nude, in contrast, describes a “form of dress that can never be naked.” Berger, Ways of Seeing, 54. Nakedness, like obscenity, seems excessive when compared to the zipped-up tightness indicative of most white female nudes in art galleries. Obscenity, like nakedness, lacks the ordered boundaries of the bovine facial expressions and the impossible back bends that dramatize the white female nude for the onlooker. Rather than an ideal composite, the white female nude is an idealized container that, as Lynda Nead has argued, forces a calm, disinterested, and vulnerable frame on the supposed menace of dynamic female sexuality. See Nead, The Female Nude, 12–17.
53. John O’Brian, Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1.
54. Ibid., 5.
55. J. M. Mancini, “‘One Term Is as Fatuous as Another’: Responses to the Armory Show Reconsidered,” American Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1999): 833–70, 835.
56. See, e.g., Kenyon Cox, “The New Art,” in Documents of the 1913 Armory Show: The Electrifying Moment of Modern Art’s American Debut (Tucson, AZ: Hol Art, 2009), 19–26.
57. Theodore Roosevelt, “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition,” in ibid., 49–50.
58. In summoning the specter of the display of the “misshapen nude,” Roosevelt was most likely recalling his spectatorship of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the butt of many jokes about modern art. There arose in response to the painting a critical mass of museum spectators who felt an intense interpretive discomfort about labeling it a nude and their experience of looking at it. These critics renamed the painting “explosion in the shingle factory.” What was clearly at stake and what apparently caused the viewer such discomfort were the ways of seeing the aestheticized white female body in the space of display. The immorality of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase encapsulated one aspect of what was interpreted as the full-on assault, not on the nude, but on the public sexual dynamic of spectatorship between the spectator and the female form. The sculptural quality of Nude Descending a Staircase endowed it with movement, and, through a breakdown of the figure in the foreground and the background of the painting, an interpretive dissonance and loss of control was produced in the viewer.
59. Elderfield, Pleasuring Painting, 12–13, 13 (quoting O’Brian, Ruthless Hedonism, 52).
60. Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, eds., Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 58.
61. See O’Brian, Ruthless Hedonism, 18; and D’Alessandro and Elderfield, eds., Matisse, 114.
62. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 53.
63. Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia,” Theatre Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 95–118, 104.
64. D’Alessandro and Elderfield, eds., Matisse, 59.
65. Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), quoted in Elderfield, Pleasuring Painting, 13. See also Pierre Schneider, Matisse, trans. Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 716.
66. Cited in Roger Benjamin, “Expression, Disfiguration: Matisse, the Female Nude and the Academic Eye,” in In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Sydney: Power, 1997), 75–105, 96.
67. Charlie Finch, “How Deep Is Her Ocean?” Artnet.com, July 30, 2010, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/henri-matisse7-30-10.asp.
68. In speaking of the museum experience as something absorptive, I am referring to Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality. Fried’s theory of absorption describes the rapt, reverent attention one should perform when interacting with high-art paintings.
69. “Social Pressures on Art Museums: An Overview of Issues” (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, Office of Policy and Analysis, November 2001), 4, http://www.si.edu/content/opanda/docs/rpts2001/01.11.socialpressure.final.pdf.
70. Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2000).
71. Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1–2 (January/April 2002): 3–21, 4. See also Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
72. Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy,” 4; Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998), 84–92, 144, 157.
73. Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 9.
74. Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy,” 7.
75. Kate Green, “Nazi Wall Texts: The 1937 Degenerate Art Show” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 2012).
76. Fae Brauer, “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower,’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis,’” in Art, Sex, and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, ed. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (London: Ashgate, 2008), 1–34, 7.
77. Ibid., 8.
78. Adolf Hitler, in a speech given at the dedication of the House of German Art, quoted in “Degenerate ‘Art’ Exhibition Guide,” trans. William C. Bunce (Redding, CT: Silver Fox, 1972), 16.
79. George L. Mosse, “Beauty without Sensuality: The Exhibition Entartete Kunst,” in Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art,” 25–31, 27–28.
80. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 105.
81. Unspecified German, fascist-supporting newspaper accounts of the time quoted in Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 1994), 20.
82. Mosse, “Beauty without Sensuality,” 28.
83. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 97.
84. Lorettann Gascard, “‘The Proper Peep’: Conflicting Female Ideals under German National Socialism,” in Brauer and Callen, eds., Art, Sex, and Eugenics, 189–208, 192.
85. Ibid., 193.
86. Herzog, Sex After Fascism, 37. Ziegler’s nickname was “Meister des deutschen Schamhaares” (master of German pubic hair).
87. See, e.g., Nicholas, The Rape of Europa; and David Roxan, The Rape of Art: The Story of Hitler’s Plunder of the Great Masterpieces of Europe (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965).
88. Mosse, “Beauty without Sensuality,” 25.
89. While the Youtube video has since been removed (the link remains active), the white supremacist site White Reference embedded it in an article with direct reference to the Degenerate Art show: “Four Swedish Nationalist Patriots Attack and Trash Andres Serrano’s Degenerate Art Exhibit, in Sweden,” White Reference, October 8, 2007, http://whitereference.blogspot.com/2007/10/four-swedish-nationalist-patriots.html. For news reports of the event, see “Art in a Magical Town,” One Way Street, October 9, 2007, http://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2007/10/art-in-a-magica.html; Carol Vogel, “Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos,” New York Times, October 9, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/arts/design/09serr.html; and “Andres Serrano Photos Destroyed in Sweden,” Artobserved, October 9, 2007, http://artobserved.com/2007/10/andres-serrano-photos-destroyed-in-sweden.
90. Paul H-O, “Andres Serrano at Paula Cooper,” Artnet.com, n.d., http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/ho/ho3-11-97.asp; Daniel Grant, “Andres Serrano Images Court Controversy and Rising Prices,” Artnews.com, November 13, 2007, http://www.artnews.com/2007/11/13/andres-serrano-images-court-controversy-and-rising-prices.
91. Paul H-O, “Andres Serrano at Paula Cooper.”
92. Clemens Bomsdorf, “No Sex Please, We’re Swedish: Nationalists Call for a Return to Tradition,” The Art Newspaper, October 28, 2010, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/No-sex-please-were-Swedish/21750.
93. In 2012 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the artist Makode Al Linde performed as a cake representing a racist caricature of an African woman and fooled the Swedish culture minister, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth. Thinking that this performance was part of a gathering to fight female circumcision, Liljeroth cut and ate the cake and was roundly criticized for it, with some factions calling for her to step down from her post. In the wake of the controversy over the decision to eat the cake and play along as well as the art piece itself, it has come to light that Linde’s performance was a double fake. Not only did he fool the culture minister; he also fooled the gathered crowd, who thought they were in on the joke. In actuality, his art piece was meant to question Sweden’s activist obsession with saving African women from the cultural ritual of female circumcision. Hrag Vartanian, “Swedish Minister Caught in ‘Racist’ Food Art Performance [UPDATED: Museum Closed Due to Bomb Threat],” Hyperallergic, April 17, 2012, http://hyperallergic.com/50115/makode-al-linde-racist-cake-moderna-museet. See also “Swedish Culture Minister in ‘Racist Cake’ Row,” Al Jazeera, April 18, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/04/201241804049897269.html.
Chapter Three
1. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 217.
2. Carol Vance quoted in ibid., 217.
3. On how the New Right used sex education debates to aid its ascendance to political power, see Irvine, Talk about Sex, esp. introduction and chap. 1. On the role of pornography in the New Right agenda, see Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
4. Gould, Moving Politics, 10, 3.
5. See Yoon Kyung Choi, “The Morphology of Exploration and Encounter in Museum Layouts” (paper presented at “Space Syntax: First International Symposium,” University College London, 1997), http://www.spacesyntax.net/symposia/1st-international-space-syntax-symposium.
6. In The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 27–29, Michael Warner differentiates between “shame” (as a temporary feeling) and “stigma” (as a less delible identity). In making this distinction, he draws from Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
7. Butler, Excitable Speech, 127–64.
8. Lisa Duggan gave a talk that primarily explored the decision to exclude Palestinian rights issues at the Gay Center in New York and the role of homonormativity and neoliberalism in that decision. Lisa Duggan, “Feeling Neoliberal: Homonormative Desires, Imperial Dreams” (paper presented at the University of Houston, April 27, 2012). In the museum world, the controversy regarding Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared up when the Spertus Museum in Chicago opened the 2008 exhibition Imaginary Coordinates. The exhibition explored the question of how Israel and Palestine are geographically defined through mapmaking practices, both historically and in the present. Sigalit Landau’s video Barbed Hula (2000), which depicts the artist on a Tel Aviv beach hula-hooping a ring of barbed wire that tears into her naked body, became a much-discussed piece in the intramuseum debates between museum staff and the members of the board of directors leading up to the abrupt and premature closure of the exhibition. In this instance and others, the mixture of the naked body and another controversial issue was used by the board of directors to pressure the museum leadership to shut down the show.
9. Butler, Excitable Speech, 134, 135.
10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–43, 13.
11. Butler, Excitable Speech, 133.
12. Lambert Zuidevaart has argued that the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, partially diverted the attentions of culture warriors. See Lambert Zuidevaart, Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In contrast, I see a continuation of the culture wars in museums in conjunction with the so-called War on Terror that merely redeployed sex. The same people who honed the use of sex and sexuality as political tools in the first round of the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s employed sex and sexuality to juxtapose a binary sexual world composed of the sexually liberated West and sexually backward Arab and Muslim nations. The burqa-wearing woman became a repetitively used visual symbol that produced the Third World Woman as an oppressed victim in need of saving by the West. For how Western feminism contributed to this explanatory construct, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17–42. On the imperialist use of Third World Women as justification for political aggression or how “white men [are] saving brown women from brown men,” see Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Geographies of Postcolonialism, ed. Joanne Sharp (London: Sage, 2009), 109–30; and Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90.
13. Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Mimi Bowling, Molly McGarry, and Fred Wasserman (New York: New York Public Library, in association with Penguin Studio, 1998). My gratitude to Molly McGarry for describing some of the unarchived events surrounding the exhibition.
14. See the essay by the Cyber Arte curator, Tey Marianna Nunn, “It’s Not about the Art in the Folk, It’s about the Folks in the Art: A Curator’s Tale,” in Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s “Irreverent Apparition,” ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 17–42.
15. Richard Meyer, “After the Culture Wars: Censorship Works Best When No One Knows It’s Happening,” Art Papers, n.d., http://almalopez.net/ORnews2/041100ap.html. See also Jennifer Tyburczy, “Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship,” The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art 52 (Winter 2014): 3–7. This article focuses on an exhibition I curated in collaboration with New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The exhibition, which ran from February 19 to May 3, 2015, drew its inspiration from the innovative responses to watershed moments in the history of censoring LGBT art in Canada, England, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States. In concept, it was principally drawn from two events: the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art in the 1980s and 1990s and the more recent withdrawal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. In practice, it seizes on the international fame of these controversies to delve deeper into the many ways that censorship functions in queer artistic life.
16. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1988; San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), 106. For an account of how the culture wars played out in Mexico, in particular Mexico City, and how the La Virgen de Guadalupe figured in these debates, see Laura G. Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 42–48. For more on the Our Lady controversy from a transnational and performance studies perspective, see ibid., 53–63.
17. Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad, 43–58; Larry Rohter, “Mexico City Journal Marilyn and Virgin: Art or Sacrilege?” New York Times, April 2, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/02/world/mexico-city-journal-marilyn-and-virgin-art-or-sacrilege.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm; Cristina Serna, “It’s Not about the Virgins in My Life, It’s about the Life in My Virgins,” in Gaspar de Alba and López, eds., Our Lady of Controversy, 165–94, 183.
18. The use of textual labels at the Nazis’ Degenerate Art show may have laid the foundations of the warning sign, especially if warning signage was viewed as having a dual function. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which warning signs mark the queer and other controversial subject matter beyond them by conditioning a shameful experience of spectatorship. Degenerate Art certainly did that, but it also attracted audiences to attend; as I mentioned in chapter 2, more people attended Degenerate Art than the House of German Art. I want to thank Gerard Koskovich for pointing out to me that, dating back at least to the explicit lyrics warnings on popular music albums, there has been a double function and a double reading of such warning-marked works. Koskovich also suggested an origin of the warning sign in the clearly specious warnings and restriction notices printed on erotic and sex-related publications from the 1930s to the 1960s (which might read, e.g., “Exclusively for use by artists in their study of the human figure”). With these examples in mind, warning signs as modes of implicit censorship can certainly have other effects (and affects), e.g., peaked fascination in the forbidden. Gerard Koskovich, email to author, July 29, 2012. Owing to the fact that most everywhere in modern culture sexual display functions along these lines, i.e., by generating taboo feelings to arouse interest, I do not focus on that normative function here.
19. I borrow the term emotive from William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327–51.
20. Butler, Excitable Speech, 159, 16, 160.
21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107–78, 197–240.
22. Lee Edelman’s mythic figure the Child represents the “fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity” that requires “the sacrifice of the queer.” When defining the threat of the queer, Edelman states: “If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive to meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.” Furnishing respectability hails the bourgeois subject, the subject assumed to be easily shocked, disgusted, or angered by the transgression of public/private, appropriate/inappropriate, when it comes to sexual or erotic performances and representations. Queer remains the sitter on the slash between this binary. The idea of the Child represents not only the underage but also the prerogative of the sexual figure most connected to anxieties over gay male sexualities. In proposing that space is constructed (in the abstract and in practice) for the idea of the nonsexual Child (as in his idea of the Child as both a “fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity” and the hope driving reproductive futurism), Edelman can be read alongside Lauren Berlant’s theory of infantile citizenship. Countless museum controversies, cases of exhibition defunding, and threats of censorship have been fueled by this relationship between the construction of deeroticized space and the (nonsexual and hypervulnerable [female, in Berlant’s work, and implicitly Anglo and bourgeois]) Child. I suggest that the symbolic Child and the symbolic Woman are stand-ins for the most vulnerable and the most powerful museum population: heterosexual men. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 25–54; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 13, 21.
23. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 10.
24. Jill Austin, Jennifer Brier, Jessica Herczeg-Konecny, and Anne Parsons, “When the Erotic Becomes Illicit: Struggles over Displaying Queer History at a Mainstream Museum,” Radical History Review 113 (Spring 2012): 187–97, 190. Brier has pointed out that it is ironic that a Chicago museum cited Mapplethorpe as the controversial flashpoint on which decisions of sexual display in Out in Chicago were determined. When Mapplethorpe’s show The Perfect Moment came to Chicago in the late 1980s, it met with no controversy (unlike installations of the show in other cities, e.g., in Cincinnati). The Wojnarowicz/National Portrait Gallery debacle occurred at the planning stages of Out in Chicago, and Brier admits that this exacerbated the struggle to include sexual talk and objects. Jennifer Brier, phone conversation with the author, May 2012.
25. See Tyburczy, “Perverting the Museum,” 153–60.
26. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110, no. 3 (May 1995): 343–49, 344.
27. Bullybloggers, “On Failure and the Future of Queer Studies,” April 2, 2012, http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com; David L. Eng, Judith [Jack] Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., “What’s Queer about Queer Theory Now?” Social Text 23, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2005): 1–17; Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds., “After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory,” special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3 (2007); Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Michael O’Rourke, “The Afterlives of Queer Theory,” continent 1, no. 2 (2011): 102–16, http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/32; Michael Warner, “Queer and Then?” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/QueerThen-/130161.
28. O’Rourke, “The Afterlives of Queer Theory.”
29. Berlant and Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” 345.
30. Cymene Howe, “Queer Pilgrimage: The San Francisco Homeland and Identity Tourism,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 1 (February 2001): 35–61.
31. I thank Gerard Koskovich, Don Romesburg, and Amy Sueyoshi for their help in drawing out the historical lineage of the Castro and the beginning of the GLBT History Museum.
32. Only the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, the Museo Travesti del Perú, and the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, located in Fort Lauderdale, share this status.
33. The “It Gets Better” project began with a video that the sex columnist Dan Savage and his husband made in response to the death of fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas, who committed suicide after being bullied for his sexuality. The video inspired numerous celebrities both within and outside the gay community to create similar inspirational videos, all with the slogan “It Gets Better.” Criticisms of the admittedly heartfelt campaign have ranged from a focus on rural children, on youths alone, and on the idea that it actually does get better. Savage’s status as a married gay man of means and the debate within queer politics over whether marriage is the best issue to rally behind has also been discussed. Above all, “It Gets Better” has been characterized as a campaign that papers over the very issues it claims will end once age, partnership, and success become realities in a bullied youth’s life. For a critique of the “It Gets Better” campaign, see Tina Majkowski, “The ‘It Gets Better Campaign’: An Unfortunate Use of Queer Futurity,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Criticism 21, no. 1 (March 2011): 163–65.
34. GLBT Historical Society, http://www.glbthistory.org/museum.
35. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 149, 7. I disagree with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s argument that heritage happens only when dead things are put on display, for two reasons. First, I believe that, in most instances, by the time a mainstream museum deems it politically correct to put a topic, thing, or idea on display, that topic, thing, or idea is already a mobile rhetorical element in mainstream society (e.g., via media channels). Second, I believe that performance remains (i.e., the practices of everyday life) and reappears as residue on and in an object or thing.
36. In this museum, queer heritage can be found in the careful collection and display of cultural objects never intended for a museum context, but it can also be found in the ways in which curators avoid the traps of univocal whitewashed narratives in their focus on queers of color and transgender and other genderqueer voices. Displays such as Queers of Color Organizing and Jiro Onuma: Undocumented/Documented, 1919–1975 show the intracategorical politics among queer communities and, in the case of the Onuma display, how easily the lives of queers of color can be ignored or passed over within an archive that historically positions the unique lives of gay white men as the benchmark for what counts as queer.
37. Mark Graham, “Sexual Things,” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): 299–303, 302.
38. Gerard Koskovich, “Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating San Francisco’s LGBT History” (paper presented at the International MANEO Conference, Berlin, November 30–December 3, 2011). For an example of the early criticisms of the museum, see Becky Yeh, “GLBT Museum Celebrates a Lie, Ignores the Truth,” One News Now (American Family Association News Service), January 19, 2011, http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=1276064.
39. Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100–108, 101.
40. Paul Gabriel, “Embracing Our Erotic Intelligence,” Museums and Social Issues 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 53–65, 63–64.
41. Matthew Bajko, “Castro LGBT Museum Will Conceal Sex Display during School Tours,” Bay Area Reporter, December 16, 2010, http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=5313. It should be noted that historical society staff and the museum curators raised this prospect only as a theoretical before the museum opened. Dozens of tours have been given to university, high school, and junior high students. Organizers requesting tours are informed that the museum includes sexual content, but curators have never received an explicit request to veil any displays. In another controversy over sexual display in museums and child visitors, an exhibition directed at young adults at the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa Canada titled Sex: A Tell All Exhibition was recently censored by the Canadian Heritage Minister, James Moore. In this exhibit, dildos on display and a video teaching young adults about masturbation became the most offensive objects. The Jocelyn Elders moment aside, the paranoia that ensues over dildo displays suggests anxiety over sexual representations when the penis (attached to a heterosexual man) is not the implied or explicit tool of arousal or that which is meant to be aroused by the display. The straight heterosexual man or young adult, not women and not children, again seems to be the most vulnerable museum visitor in this scenario. Kris Sims, “Museum’s Sex Show Gets Dressing Down from Feds,” Toronto Sun, May 16, 2012, http://www.torontosun.com/2012/05/16/museums-sex-show-gets-dressing-down-from-feds.
42. Bajko, “Castro LGBT Museum Will Conceal Sex Display during School Tours.”
43. “Comments: GLBT History Museum, Nation’s First Gay Museum, Opens in San Francisco,” Huffington Post, January 12, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/12/glbt-history-museum-natio_n_807931.html.
44. Mari N. on Yelp: “Caveat re: the ‘Sex Toys: Implementing Erotic Expression’ display: there is nothing shocking about the display, but if you are easily flustered or if you care about who you are standing next to while gazing at phalluses, just know that it is in the back corner of the museum.” “GLBT History Museum,” Yelp, n.d., http://www.yelp.com/biz/glbt-history-museum-san-francisco. The inclusion of the sex toy display also attracted some positive comments and impassioned defenders.
45. In this exhibit, the curators strive to avoid presenting gay marriage as the primary objective of the gay rights movement and provide instead a queer reading of the concept of family.
46. Edelman, No Future.
47. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
48. Displaying and “museumifying” sexual minorities raises issues of vulnerability through visibility. Peggy Phelan (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance [London: Routledge, 1993]), Judith Butler (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 307–20), José Muñoz (“Ephemera as Evidence”), and Ann Cvetkovich (An Archive of Feelings) argue more solidly against representational visibility as a means to enact a queer politics, while Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (“Sex in Public”), David Bell and Gill Valentine (Mapping Desire), and Lisa Duggan (“Queering the State,” in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, ed. Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter [New York: Routledge, 1995], 179–93) argue more solidly for queer visibility in order to destabilize heteronormative spaces. Jill Dolan seems to consider all sides of the debate most thoroughly in Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 20, 195, a book whose essays “can be placed in counterpoint to Butler’s argument, asserting the remnant of efficacy for the visual while arguing that the subjectivities and sexual practices brought into view don’t necessarily have to dictate public, fixed, totalizing identity politics.” I agree with Dolan that “representing any sex act in public is transgressive” and that making visible queer sex “in the public sphere, rather than imagining it in private, moves toward Foucault’s notion of a different economy of bodies and pleasures.” Of course, Dolan offers this commentary within a theater paradigm, a medium of greater ephemeral value, though also heavily policed.
Chapter Four
1. See Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 142–66; Raymond Michalowski and Nancy A. Wonders, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism in a Globalized World: A Tale of Two Cities—Amsterdam and Havana,” Social Problems 48, no. 4 (November 2001): 545–71.
2. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 142–66; Gail M. Zuckerwise, “Governmentality in Amsterdam’s Red Light District,” City 16, nos. 1–2 (2012): 146–57.
3. Thanh-Dam Truong, “The Dynamics of Sex Tourism: The Case of South East Asia,” Development and Change 14, no. 4 (October 1983): 533–53, 544.
4. A report by David Pinder on tourism in the Netherlands that came out a year earlier than my trip to Amsterdam’s red-light district estimated that almost half a million people visited the Venustempel in 1995 and that 158,000 attended the Erotic Gallery that same year, with both figures having risen by one-fifth in two years. David Pinder, “Tourism in the Netherlands: Resource Development, Regional Impacts, and Issues,” in Tourism and Economic Development: European Experiences, ed. Allan M. Williams and Gareth Shaw (New York: Wiley, 1998), 301–24, 310.
5. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 142–48, 156–66. See also Ronald Weitzer, Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 146–203 (“Amsterdam”).
6. Michalowski and Wonders, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism in a Globalized World,” 550–54.
7. Williams, “Film Bodies,” 3–5.
8. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157.
9. See Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex”; Erik Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1998): 371–86; Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976); Dean MacCannell and Juliet MacCannell, “Tourist Agency,” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 23–37; Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered?”; and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). For sex tourism, see Thomas G. Bauer and Bob McKercher, Sex and Tourism: Journeys of Romance, Love, and Lust (New York: Haworth Hospitality, 2003); Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Amalia L. Cabezas, “Women’s Work Is Never Done: Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic,” in Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, ed. Kamala Kempadoo (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 93–123; Stephen Clift and Simon Carter, “Tourism, International Travel and Sex: Themes and Research,” in Tourism and Sex: Culture, Commerce, and Coercion, ed. Stephen Clift and Simon Carter (London: Pinter, 2000), 1–22; Coco Fusco, “Hustling for Dollars: Jineteras in Cuba,” in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (London: Routledge, 1998), 151–66; Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex, and Gold; Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005); Gregory Mitchell, “Turboconsumers™ in Paradise: Tourism, Civil Rights, and Brazil’s Gay Sex Industry,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 4 (2011): 666–82; Mark Padilla, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Adriana Piscitelli, “On Gringos and Natives, Gender and Sexuality in the Context of International Sex Tourism,” Vibrant—Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 1 (2004): 1–27; Chris Ryan and Colin Michael Hall, Sex Tourism: Marginal People and Liminalities (London: Routledge, 2001); Jeremy Seabrook, Travels in the Skin Trade: Tourism and the Sex Industry (London: Pluto, 1996); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Verta A. Taylor, Leila J. Rupp, and Nancy Whittier, Feminist Frontiers (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009); and Michalowski and Wonders, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism in a Globalized World.”
10. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 104.
11. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 137.
12. Mark Neumann, “Wandering through the Museum: Experience and Identity in a Spectator Culture,” Border/Lines 12 (Summer 1988): 19–27.
13. Michael S. Bowman, “Looking for Stonewall’s Arm: Tourist Performance as Research Method,” in Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Studies, ed. Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 102–34, 104.
14. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1993).
15. Jennifer Craik, “The Culture of Tourism,” in Tourism Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojec and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), 113–36, 118.
16. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 137.
17. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Duggan and Hunter, eds., Sex Wars; Irvine, Talk about Sex.
18. “Museum of Sex,” NYIndia. US, New York Indian Community Guide, http://www.nyindia.us/sex-museum.html.
19. For more on the Grand Tour, see Kendrick, The Secret Museum; Randolph Delehanty, “The Wayward Curator: Italian Curators, Erotic Art, and Kid-Friendly Labels,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (April 2011): 207–14; Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); John Towner, “The Grand Tour: A Key Phase in the History of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 3 (1985): 297–333; and Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 2011), 109–24.
20. On collecting and the Grand Tour, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Toronto: Penguin, 1991); and Edward Chaney, The Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
21. Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Representations 4 (Summer 1983): 40–67.
22. Gregory Mitchell, “Packaging Desire: Commissioning Performances of Racialized Masculinity in Brazil’s Gay Sex Industry” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2012), 40–41.
23. Ralph Blumenthal, “Sex Museum Reports Profitability,” New York Times, November 19, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/arts/sex-museum-reports-profitability.html; Julia Goldman, “Daniel Gluck: MoSex and the Jews,” New York Jewish Week, September 27, 2002, http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/short_takes/%27mosex%27_and_jews; Mary Jane Fine, “The Lewd? Museum of Sex Being Planned,” NYDailyNews.com, January 19, 2000, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2000-01-19/news/18133537_1_museum-director-animal-kingdom-sharples-holden-pasquarelli; Ralph Gardner Jr., “Sex, If Not Always Sexy,” Urban Gardner, September 29, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882404575520161788277620.html; Steven Heller, “Daniel Gluck, Director, Museum of Sex (Back Talk),” Print, July 1, 2004, http://business.highbeam.com/3273/article-1G1-119783672/daniel-gluck-director-museum-sex; Steve Kurutz, “Neighborhood Report: MIDTOWN; The Museum of Sex Spends Its First Year with a Headache,” New York Times, October 12, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/nyregion/neighborhood-report-midtown-museum-sex-spends-its-first-year-with-headache.html; Maria Puente, “Sex Scores Its Own Museum in the City,” USA Today, September 30, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2002/2002-09-23-sex-museum.htm.
24. Many thanks to Theresa Smalec, who volunteered at MoSex, for this information.
25. For more on the Times Square purification project, see Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire (London: Routledge, 2002); and Lynn Comella, “Re-Inventing Times Square: Cultural Value and Images of ‘Citizen Disney,’” in Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader, ed. Justin Lewis and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 316–26.
26. “Museum of Sex Is a Museum of Smut,” Catholic League, October 23, 2002, http://www.catholicleague.org/museum-of-sex-is-a-museum-of-smut.
27. Leah Arroyo, “Sex, Drugs, and Pirates: The Rise of the for-Profit Museum,” Museum, November–December 2008, 62–68.
28. Robin Pogrebin, “Tax Break for Erotica? A Museum Favors It,” New York Times, May 3, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/arts/design/04sex.html?pagewanted=all.
29. Caroline Tiger, “How the Museum of Sex Turned a Nonprofit Snub into an Asset,” Entrepreneur.com, June 14, 2012, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223623.
30. Edward Rothstein, “Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed,” New York Times, February 5, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/arts/design/05sex.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.
31. Since I conducted my fieldwork in 2006, the Museum of Sex has expanded its gift shop into a grand front room with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Previously, visitors would have to go around the corner of Twenty-seventh Street to enter the museum, a setup that deterred pedestrian and tourist traffic. Visitors now enter from Fifth Avenue into a well-lit space that showcases a wide array of stock. While the gift shop has dramatically changed, the changes that MoSex has made only further demonstrate the arguments about touch, money, and sex in the for-profit museum as a postindustrial sex tourism destination.
32. Jack (staff member at Museum of Sex, New York), in discussion with the author, August 30, 2006. Most staff and all visitors’ names at sex museums are pseudonyms.
33. For the sexual politics of shrinkwrap, particularly the use of modern industrial material and global packaging as a product “condom,” consider Madonna, Sex (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 1992). See also Frank Rich, “The New Blood Culture,” New York Times, December 6, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/06/style/the-new-blood-culture.html.
34. Elizabeth Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History,” differences 19, no. 1 (2008): 32–70, 3, 11, 34.
35. Berger, Ways of Seeing.
36. Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars.
37. For a film that explores the appropriation of sex-positive feminism by the pharmaceutical industry, see Orgasm, Inc.: The Strange Science of Female Pleasure, directed by Liz Canner (Astrea Media, 2009), DVD.
38. Poor women in Chinese factories make many of the sex toys designed for and marketed toward women. David Rosen, “The Global Trade in Sex Toys: Made in China,” Counterpunch, December 2006, www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/02/made-in-china.
39. While Renaissance and classical depictions of the Leda and the Swan myth hang in high-art museums, contemporary renditions of the story have met with censorship and charges of bestiality. See Hannah Furness, “‘Mythical’ Swan Photo Taken Down After ‘Bestiality’ Fears,” Telegraph, April 12, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9232512/Mythical-swan-photo-taken-down-after-bestiality-fears.html.
40. Naomi Wilzig, in discussion with the author, November 14, 2006.
41. Mary Weismantel, “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (September 2004): 495–505.
42. The idea that there is a demonstrable difference between erotica and pornography is a concept that was appropriated by antipornography feminists in the 1970s. As Lynda Nead has pointed out, the discourse of erotica began with books like Peter Webb’s The Erotic Arts and the sexual libertarianism of the 1960s, a philosophy that viewed sexual liberation as an essential component of social revolution. In the 1970s, moral regulation focused more on representations than on behavior, and Webb’s book encapsulated the primary strategy for making cultural distinctions between erotic art and the slippery legal category of obscenity that was solidified in cases such as Miller v. California (1973). See Nead, The Female Nude, 104–6; and Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983).
43. Ramón, in discussion with the author, November 13, 2006.
44. Campbell Jefferys, “Reaping the Benefits of Neon,” Travel Intelligence, http://www.travelintelligence.com/travel-writing/reeping-benefits-neon (now defunct).
45. Tony (staff member at the World Erotic Art Museum), in discussion with author, November 13, 2006.
46. During my stay at WEAM, a staff member also provided me with a pie chart showing that male- and female-identifying visitors were roughly equal in number. These numbers were based on the visitor guidebook.
47. For literature and films on female sex tourists, see Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, “Fantasy Islands: Exploring the Demand for Sex Tourism,” in Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex, and Gold, 37–54; Heading South, directed by Laurent Cantet (SodaPictures, 2005), DVD; and Jessica Jacobs, Sex, Tourism, and the Postcolonial Encounter: Landscapes of Longing in Egypt (London: Ashgate, 2010).
48. Desmond, Staging Tourism, 254.
49. Rachel and Frank (visitors to Museum of Sex, New York), in discussion with author, August 31, 2006.
Chapter Five
1. Chilango once referred to a Mexican national who moved to Mexico City from another part of Mexico. It now refers to anyone who resides or at one point resided in Mexico City (although who can claim chilango is up for debate). From the perspective of the rest of the Mexican Republic, to be chilango is to perform a stereotype of an urban capitalino (someone from the capital) who possesses a certain accent and a certain intonation of the voice (singsong, loud), uses certain vocabulary (sexually laden expletives), and has a general attitude about everyday and political matters (progressive, cosmopolitan, defiant). Calling someone a chilango carries either affectionate or derogatory connotations, depending on who is wielding the term. Most Mexico City residents I have spoken to use the term with self-referential pride. Mexicans who are not chilango but who aspire to be through accent, dress, and political views often do so out of a desire to be seen by their peers as cosmopolitan.
2. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. See also Alicia Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); and Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (Boston: South End, 1993), 145–74 (“Queer Aztlán”).
3. Evelyn Blackwood, “Transnational Discourses and Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 4 (2008): 481–507. See also Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa, eds., Female Desires: Same Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). In México, the acronym LGBTTTI is often used and stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, travesti (crossdresser, most often in a theatrical context; also referred to as vestida), and intersex.
4. For work that examines the effect of museum display on sexual identity, see Levin, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Museums; Fraser and Heimlich, eds., “Where Is Queer?”; and Ridinger, “Things Visible and Invisible.”
5. In this chapter, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of practices whereby global citizens become modern when they act, dress, and consume within the neoliberal marketplace. MuseXo provides one physical site where the relationship between globalization, the struggle for sexual rights, and vernacular performances steeped in neoliberal ideologies of private property, privatization, and an intense form of individualism plays out. See Homi Bhabha, “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 133–42; Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and Imagined Globalization, trans. George Yúdice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Néstor García Canclini and Gilberto Guevara Niebla, eds., La educatión y la cultura ante el tratado de libre comercio (Mexico City: Fundación Nexus/Nueva Imagen, 1992); Peter Gowan, “Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism,” New Left Review 11 (September–October 2001), http://newleftreview.org/II/11/peter-gowan-neoliberal-cosmopolitanism; David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Henrietta L. Moore and David Held, Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity, and Innovation (London: Oneworld, 2008); Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Rowicka, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (London: Ashgate, 2011); and Sayak Valencia, Capitalismo gore (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Melusina, 2010).
6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). In this text, Foucault discusses the institutionalization of what counts as truth, proof, or acceptable discourse.
7. Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 361–85.
8. Jane H. Bayes and Rita Mae Kelly, eds., Gender, Globalization, and Democratization (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Valentine M. Moghadam, “Gender and the Global Economy,” in Revisioning Gender, ed. Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2000), 128–60; Robert Went, Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses (London: Pluto, with the International Institute for Research and Education, 2000). In queer studies, see Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje; Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
9. Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire”; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
10. Gerald Coll-Planas, La carne y la metáfora: Una reflexión sobre el cuerpo en la teoría queer (Barcelona: EGALES, 2012); David Córdova, Teoría queer: Políticas bolleras, maricas, trans, mestizos (Barcelona: EGALES, 2005); José Javier Martistany, “¿Una teoría queer latinoamericana? Postestructuralismo y políticas de la identidad en Lemebel,” Lectures du genre no. 4: Lecturas queer desde el Cono Sur, n.d., http://www.lecturesdugenre.fr/Lectures_du_genre_4/Maristany_files/MARISTANY.pdf; Norma Mogrovejo, “‘¿Es lo queer un concepto político?’” Mulheres Rebeldes, May 25, 2010, http://mulheresrebeldes.blogspot.com/2010/05/es-lo-queer-un-concepto-politico.html; Susan López Penedo, El laberinto queer: La identidad en tiempos del neoliberalismo (Madrid: EGALES, 2008); Beatriz [Paul B.] Preciado, “Cartografías queer: El flâneur perverso, la lesbiana topofóbica y la puta multicartográfica, o como hacer una cartografía ‘zorra’ con Annie Sprinkle,” Artillería Inmanente 24 (April 8, 2012), http://artilleriainmanente.blogspot.com/2012/04/cartografias-queer-beatriz-preciado.html; Paola Arboleda Ríos, “Ser o estar ‘queer’ en Latinoamérica? El devenir emancipador en: Lemebel, Perlongher, y Arenas,” Íconos: Revista de ciencias sociales 39 (2011): 111–21; Felipa Rivas, “Diga ‘queer’ con la lengua afuera: Sobre las confusiones del debate latinoamericano,” in Por un feminismo sin mujeres, ed. Territorios Sexuales (Santiago de Chile: Editorxs Coordinadora Universitaria por la Disidencia, 2011), 1–14; Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, “La pólitica queer del espanglish,” Debate feminista 17, no. 33 (April 2006): 141–53.
11. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure; Rofel, Desiring China.
12. For Paz, the way to create a vulnerable, emasculated opponent is through the combination of sexual language and skilled execution of witty double meaning snugly placed within the flow of everyday conversation. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1984), 50–67 (“Máscaras mexicanas”), 61.
13. Héctor Carrillo, The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 64.
14. Carrillo, The Night Is Young, 16. This is not to say that sexual diversity is anything new in Mexico. Rather, the way in which everyday actors talk about sex and sexuality has undergone a significant shift, and I concentrate on the ways in which popular cultural productions may have influenced the rhetoric of sexual modernity. For a discussion of the long history of sexual diversity since the Conquista, see Porfirio Miguel Hernández Cabrera, “Los estudios sobre diversidad sexual en el PUEG,” in Sexualidades diversas: Aproximaciones para su análisis, ed. Gloria Careaga and Salvador Cruz (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), 21–33, 27–28. See also Carlos Monsiváis, Que se abra esa puerta: Crónicas y ensayos sobre la diversidad sexual (Mexico City: Paidos, 2010).
15. Carrillo, The Night Is Young, 16.
16. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
17. “Sex-Mex: The Founder of the Expo Sexo Is Mixing Business with Pleasure in Overwhelmingly Catholic Mexico; So Far, His Recipe Has Worked,” Entrepreneur.com, April 18, 2008, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/193252.
18. Expo Sexo did not come together in 2013, for reasons unknown to me. In 2014, the Kibrits decided to cancel Expo Sexo for fear of being jailed under Mexico City’s sex-trafficking law (the Ley para Prevenir, Sancionar y Erradicar el Delito de Trata de Personas). Ignacio Alzaga, “DF: Empresarios de Expo Sexo cancelan evento por temor a ser encarcelados,” Milenio.com, January 1, 2014, http://www.milenio.com/df/DF-empresarios-Expo-Sexo-encarcelados_0_254374575.html.
19. S. Lynne Walker, “Sex Plaza in Mexico Gives New Meaning to Strip Mall,” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 17, 2005, http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051017/news_1n17sexmall.html.
20. Ibid.
21. Other factors that may have precipitated the closure of MuseXo include a focus on urban cleansing of downtown Mexico City under the leadership of Carlos Slim’s Grupo Carso, the economic effects of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s postelection protests on downtown businesses (in 2006, Felipe Calderón had been elected, his detractors claimed, by voter fraud, and, when I visited MuseXo in the fall of 2007, there were still a few protesters stationed in the zócalo), and, according to the MuseXo curator Tacho Padilla, a conflict between the ludic educational goals of the museum and what he described as the purely moneymaking prerogatives of Alberto Kibrit’s Sex and Entertainment enterprise. According to another source, Sex Capital never stopped being lucrative; rather, it could no longer function as a business owing to pressure from powerful conservative groups such as Provida and the Catholic Church and a change in leadership within the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), which governed the Cuauhtémoc Delegation, where MuseXo was located. In personal correspondence, Alberto Kibrit told me that he had sold the building to the government, which in turn sold the building to the leadership of the ambulantes (a highly formalized and political wing of the huge informal market culture in Mexico City). When I returned to MuseXo in 2012, I took a personal tour of the complex. Many Mexican women I spoke to warned me against visiting Sex Capital for fear that I would get mugged, and my fellow Fulbright colleagues warned me against making inquiries about who owned the building. Nevertheless, I asked—the man selling socks, the young women cooking quesadillas, and the ten or so sex shops that still remained—to whom they were paying rent. No one could (or wanted to) answer me; they said that someone arrived every month for the check, and the person’s affiliation was unknown to them. I then climbed the now-broken escalators to the fourth floor, where MuseXo once was, and took some photos of MuseXo’s ruins (the facade was still intact). I asked a few young men who had set up a DIY art workshop about the Jehovah’s Witness church that had seemingly established itself on the same floor. As we spoke, a man and a woman who had been watching me suspiciously for some time approached to tell me that I could not take photos and sternly advised the young men with whom I was speaking to stop talking to me. I gave the young men my card in the hopes that they would contact me, as they seemed to have some insider information (they never did get in touch). I left in a hurry, making sure I had not been followed before I ducked into the underground metro station.
22. Lauren Berlant, “Starved,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 433–44; Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and “Sociality and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 641–56; Edelman, No Future.
23. Padilla is a prestigious Mexico City museum designer who has worked on projects that include the Mayan gallery at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (national museum of anthropology), the most-visited museum in Mexico City and widely regarded as one of, if not the most, comprehensive and well-respected anthropology museums in the world. He now owns and operates the Centro Cultural Eje, an art gallery in the Mexico City neighborhood of Navarte.
24. Tarcisio Padilla Carrillo (former curator at El Museo del Sexo in Mexico City), in discussion with author, September 9, 2007:
JT: Quería preguntar de la reputación de la sexualidad de los Estados Unidos aquí en México . . .
Padilla: La reputación pensamos . . . hay una cedula que es “son swingers” o “!qué modernos!” Porque pensamos que los norteamericanos tienen una sexualidad muy libre, ¡utópicamente! Porque no es la verdad. Porque ellos tienen la tecnología, porque ellos tiene el Village en Nueva York, tienen esos saunas, tienen esos . . . pero todo es underground. Es escondido, es oscuro. Siempre la sexualidad la buscamos como muy oscura, y pensamos que por ser gringos, están utópicos. Es como el ejemplo de México: para los sudamericanos, México es el trampolín para llegar al sueño americano –o sea brasileños, argentinos, bolivianos, peruanos– todos llegan a México como el gran sueño. Eso se da con artistas hasta de Iberoamérica, hasta de España vienen, porque creen que México es el paraíso, ¿sí?
JT: ¿De sexualidad?
Padilla: Paraíso del sentido de oportunidades sino de sexualidad para llegar a Estados Unidos. Y la pregunta concreta que tú me dices, si tenemos la imagen de que son gringos, son muy buenos para el sexo, o son muy grandes, o son muy fuertes, porque tienen una adoración culto del cuerpo humano. Si tú no eres como Jennifer López, ¡no eres nadie! Si tú no eres Arnold Schwarzenager, ¡no eres nadie! Yo puedo ser una gente normal . . . la imagen que tenemos nosotros en el mundo de los Estados Unidos es “el Todo Poderoso.”
25. Mexico City is joining popular beach resorts like Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, and Acapulco as a destination for (mostly) gay male (and much less frequently lesbian) tourists from the United States.
26. Lionel Cantú, “De Ambiente: Queer Tourism and the Shifting Boundaries of Mexican Male Sexualities,” GLQ 8, nos. 1–2 (2002): 139–66, 142, 139.
27. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim (the richest man in the world) hired Rudolph Giuliani to visit the Centro Históric and act as a consultant for his Grupo Carso, which for many years dominated decisions about the built environment in downtown Mexico City. Slim’s aim was to revitalize the historic center to ready it for international tourism. The timing of Giuliani’s consultancy job in Mexico City leads me to propose that Giuliani’s distaste for public sexual cultures in favor of Disneyfication projects may have contributed to the closure of Sex Capital and by default MuseXo.
28. Bizcocho is a pound cake. With the article el (the), the combination in Spanish sounds like a combination of Elvis, as in the American singer, and cocho, a term that can mean “pussy” in Mexican vernacular, so this can also be translated into something like Elvis Pussy.
29. Chacal means a masculine man who does not identify as gay but who plays the penetrative role in sex with men, and -ator is an augmentative suffix referencing Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film Terminator.
30. Un canto para tan encantadora, parte hombre o mujer, heterosexual, gay o quimera, no temas las primas de la flor, fauna, y primavera: lúdica, erótica, y lúbrica, acompañadas por El Bizcocho y el súper héroe, Chacalator, te guiarán por este universo casi desconocido. Prepárate para entrar al maravilloso mundo del erotismo; disponte también a reír: quizás vayas a alucinarte o a excitarte . . . ¿eres curioso? ¿Caliente? Entra y lo sabrás. No será una experiencia ni científica ni moralista, simplemente una forma de conocer y de disfrutar el encanto infinito de amar: El placer de vivir.
31. Ex-votos are votive offerings to saints or other divinities that are placed in churches or chapels where worshipers offer gratitude or seek forgiveness or grace.
32. Though more recent films such as Amores perros and Y tu mamá también portray complex, though still at times clichéd, depictions of Mexican masculinity and sexuality, the stereotype of the (American-style) psychoanalyzed Mexican man with the gargantuan inferiority complex has been a mainstay of film depictions of Mexicanidad (Mexican-ness) since the 1950s. These works cumulatively grow out of a period in Mexican political and intellectual movements that sought to simultaneously forge a Mexican national identity alongside the notion of a violent (male) underclass grossly ill equipped for such a project. For more on how Mexican intellectuals wittingly and unwittingly joined forces with nation-building forces to stigmatize the working-class Mexican male, see José Eduardo Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 72–100. For more on the complex performances of Mexican male masculinity that counter the overweening stereotype of the Mexican macho male, see Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
33. Carrillo, The Night Is Young, 150.
34. Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Weheliye is principally concerned with how black musicians, filmmakers, and authors used and referenced technologies of sound to bring about the emergence of modern black culture (what he calls sonic Afro-modernity).
35. This is subversive considering the stigma in Mexican culture surrounding anal passivity and how it disqualifies men who bottom, or pasivos, from real-man status
36. Por que hay un Kama Sutra, y hay un Kama Sutra chilango. El Chilango es las avenidas. Una “a-venida” es un orgasmo, ¿sí? El segundo piso son dos encimados—es el anillo periférico es en “Ano-illo-periférico” (que es una calle de los freeways) . . . Por ejemplo Niños Héroes son dos niños héroes mexicanos que lucharon por el país, ¿verdad? Entonces los pongo como albur, doble sentido de dos homosexuales. Morena Bichola son dos calles, entonces son dos lesbianas, lo ves gráficamente de acuerdo esos gráficos, son los cuentitos medio-pornos que hay aquí en los periódicos. Los compra el obrero, el taxista, la gente popular goza mucho de estos libritos pornos, cuentitos como comics que son ilustrados.
37. On the role of music and the space of the club in queer politics and gay male community building, see David Román, “Editorial: Dance Liberation,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (October 2003): vii–xxiv.
38. Swingers and swinging describe the players and play in a complex culture of nonmonogamous sexual activity. MuseXo wall texts state that a culture called swinger emerged in Mexico after polyamorous Mexicans began to appropriate this term from US sexual discourse to describe their sexual activities.
39. Joto and jota and the diminutives jotito and jotita are generally used as derogatory slang terms by nonqueer people (comparable to sissy or faggot). It can be an acceptable and even affectionate term, however, when used among queer communities. It is also not so subtly coded with gendered meanings drawn from the inferior position of women in patriarchal Mexican society. Conversely, queer Mexican communities generally apply buga as a derogatory slang term for straight or heterosexual.
40. Heterosexual: Gente que gusta de relaciones físicas y emocionales con el sexo opuesto. Bisexual: Aquéllos a los que de repente, o después de dos chelas, les gusta tener una aventurilla con personas de su mismo sexo y luego se les olvida. Transgénero: Persona sin cirugía genital, que actúa y se viste como el género opuesto. Puede tener implantes de chichis, sentirse mujer, y actuar como tal pero, conserva su pene o puede ser una mujer que actúa y se sienta como un hombre. Transexual: Persona que se siente del sexo opuesto y que no sólo transforma su imagen sino que hace la “operación jarocha.”
A sex change is referred to as an operación jarocha on the basis of its rhyming quality with the albur that goes: “Operación jarocha: Te quitan (o te cortan) el pito y te ponen panocha.” (Jarocha operation: They take away [or cut off] your penis and put in a pussy.”) Thanks to Guillermo De los Reyes for clarifying this albur.
41. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210, 159; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 28. See also Marta Lamas, ed., El género: La construccón cultural de la diferencia sexual (Mexico City: PUEG/Grupo Editorial Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1996/2013), “Género, diferencias de sexo y diferencia sexual,” Debate feminista 10, no. 20 (October 1999): 84–106, and “Diferencias de sexo, género, y diferencia sexual,” Cuicuilco 7, no. 18 (January–April 2000): 1–24.
42. Carrillo, The Night Is Young, 24, 39.
43. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). See also Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–22 (“Introduction: Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body”). These texts explore how “woundedness” became the basis for a sense of identity, government protection, and political redress. Robinson describes how the men’s movement appropriated this political move from the feminist, civil rights, and LGBT rights movements.
44. Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 142.
45. Tyburczy, “Perverting the Museum,” 153, 157–58. For a study that examines the relationship between commodification, whiteness, and desire and the pansexual community in San Francisco, see Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure.
46. The reluctance to examine race in American sex museums stems, I feel, from an anxiety about repeating a history of sexual display of cultural otherness, as in the exhibition of Sarah Baartman discussed in chapter 2. Whether these museums say so or not, most of the exhibitions in the United States bracket the ubiquitous drama of white privilege and the sex industry.
47. Fabian defined the denial of coevalness “as a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press), 31.
Chapter Six
1. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Butler, Bodies That Matter.
2. The Attendant, directed by Isaac Julien (San Francisco: Frameline, 1993), VHS, 8 minutes.
3. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36. See also Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
4. Anne McClintock, “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power,” in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 207–32, 221.
5. Carol S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Another conference where sadomasochism became a major point of controversy was “Revolting Behaviors: The Challenge of Women’s Sexual Freedom,” held at the State University of New York, New Paltz, in 1997. For more information on “Revolting Behaviors,” see Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 22–42.
6. Robert Mapplethorpe and Ntozake Shange, Black Book (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988).
7. Leather Archives and Museum, “Leather Archives & Museum Says ‘Burn That Mortgage!’” press release, August 4, 2004.
8. Quoted in Robert Ridinger, “Sister Fire: Representing the Legacies of Leatherwomen,” in Levin, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, 172–82, 174–75.
9. Judith [Jack] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Love, Feeling Backward; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
10. Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around,” 40, 41, 42. In Reel for Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996), bell hooks also wrote about labor, class, and the Conservator character in The Attendant. See also Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 111–52.
11. Freeman situated the film as a representation of the race politics in queer communities of the early 1990s. She explained that Julien’s ambivalent rendering of sadomasochistic fantasy was in direct response to the vilification of interracial sadomasochism, perhaps most famously critiqued by Kobena Mercer in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), his book on Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, and the late Marlon Rigg’s film Tongues Untied, the latter claiming SM as a “white thing.”
12. Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around,” 53–54.
13. See hooks, Reel to Real, 91–97 (“Thinking through Class: Paying Attention to The Attendant”).
14. There is only one other woman in the film, a white woman whom Julien positions as one of a small group of well-dressed, expressionless museum guests who meander through the galleries before the Attendant and the leather man engage in their whipping scene. Played by Thelma Speirs (one half of the millinery label Bernstock Speirs), she, like every other member of the well-coiffed museum visitor posse, is one among a very elite class of intellectuals and artists who live in and around London.
15. Rather than portray the Attendant as an identifying member of gay culture, Julien strategically positioned him as a down-low character through a brief but important scene where he descends a flight of stairs in the Wilberforce House or some other domestic environment to gently kiss the Conservator at the base of the staircase. For me, unlike Julien, this scene does not necessarily confirm that the Attendant and the Conservator are involved in some matrimonial union, but it definitely suggests that they have sealed some kind of pact to keep the secret of the Attendant’s desire/fantasy/embodiment of illicit erotic behavior. For more on the closet, the alibi, and heterosexuality in The Attendant, see Isaac Julien, “Confessions of a Snow Queen: Notes on the Making of The Attendant,” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 1994): 120–26, esp. 121–22.
16. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). Hebdige examined how in the 1980s white punk culture developed amid a black separatist movement that was responding to scathing discrimination. Punk emerged as a white style that, according to Hebdige, “contained distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures.” Ibid., 26. Wearing leather was one of many performances in this distorted bricolage.
17. The term vanilla has a rich and inconclusive history, but colloquially it is often used to suggest or represent any sexual activity that is socially or legally sanctioned as decorous or appropriate. See Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 220n5. Hart concludes that the term was first used in the gay leather community; however, she also finds interesting associations with race and gender discourse. Freud’s depiction of women’s sexuality as the “dark continent” is notable among them.
18. Under the direction of Rick Storer, its executive director, the LA&M has made huge inroads toward changing its historical relationship to the community’s diverse populations. In 2010, the Women’s Leather History Project (WLHP) began, and, in May 2011 the LA&M, in partnership with the WLHP and the curator Dr. Alex Warner, unveiled the exhibition A Room of Her Own just in time for International Mr. Leather weekend, a strategic choice intended to give the exhibition the greatest possible publicity. As director of programming from 2009 to 2010, I was also encouraged to create archives dedicated to “Latino/as in Leather” and to begin research that explored how leather as a cultural identity emerged and developed in Latin and South America. Additionally, the Debates in Leather exhibition that followed the one described in this chapter and titled Leather Anatomy: The Politics of Transgender Inclusion responded to a patron request for an exhibit on transgender and transsexual leather participants that was recorded in the visitor response book. As a result of this request, I created a display that coincided with the 2010 win of Tyler McCormick, an out trans man and a wheelchair user. For the written adaptation of this exhibit, see Jennifer Tyburczy, “Leather Anatomy: Crippling Gay Masculinity at International Mr. Leather,” in “Cripistemologies,” ed. Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, special issue, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 3 (2014): 275–94. In 2012, I was invited by the LA&M to moderate the panel “Chicago in Leather,” where a diverse group of people gathered to tell the multiple histories that make up leather culture in Chicago.
19. Cain Berlinger, Black Men in Leather (Tempe, AZ: Third Millennium, 2002).
20. Psychological play is often referred to in the kink lifestyle as domination/submission or D/S. A mind fuck is a mind trip that can be psychological (as in fear play or humiliation play) or tactile (as in illusions of sensation pertaining to heat/cold, liquids, or sharp edges).
21. Scourge and coffee, “The History of Black BDSM,” Dark Connections: BDSM for People of Color, n.d., http://www.darkconnections.com/main.htm.
22. Berlinger, Black Men in Leather, 45–50.
23. Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around,” 54.
24. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 4, 7, 9.
25. See, e.g., Robert Blackson, “Once More . . . with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Culture,” Art Journal 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 28–40; Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR/The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2011): 16–45; Sven Lütticken, ed., Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2005); Phelan, Unmarked; Roach, Cities of the Dead; and Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, especially the concept of binary terror. See also Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). And, for an article that speaks to the specificity of reenactment and its impact on the erasure of black feminine erotics, see Brody, “Black Cat Fever.” The vast literature on ritual performance is also pertinent here and perhaps best understood through the concepts of the liminoid and the ludic as described by Victor Turner. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 1969).
26. The phrase lipstick traces was also used as the title of Greil Marcus’s “secret history,” which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Situationists International, and a sixteenth-century Anabaptist revolt through an innovative examination of how voices of protest and social agitation have been invisibly passed on. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
27. Classen, “Museum Manners,” 896.
28. Schneider, “Performing Remains,” 101.
29. “ArtLex’s R-Reg page,” n.d., http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/R.html.
30. Love, Feeling Backward.
31. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 54.
Coda
1. All the comments were gathered from visitor books and interviews conducted on-site in the museums except for Peter LaBarbera’s. Peter LaBarbera, “Sodom-by-the-Lake; Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton Hosts Perverse ‘International Mr. Leather,’” Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, May 31, 2007, http://americansfortruth.com/issues/bdsm/page/8.
2. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3.
3. Boris Smodorinsky, “The Erotic Museum, Hollywood Closed Its Doors,” press release, May 4, 2006, http://www.artcom.com/Museums/newones/90028.htm.
4. Ibid.
5. Steven Tagle, “Touring the Erotic Museum,” Leland Quarterly 1, no. 1 (December 2006): 15–19, 16, http://lelandq.wordpress.com/2006/12/21/touring-the-erotic-museum.
6. Carlos Motta, “An Interview with Jonathan D. Katz.”