“This is a unique and valuable book. Tyburczy’s grand theme is seexuality on display and the individual case histories presented are very compelling and studded with wholly new interpretations. Tyburczy has selected a notably diverse array of incidents that beautifully index period ideas about seex and its structures of visibility and invisibility. Ultimately, in weighing these discreet histories within a new category of displaying seex, Seex Museums manages to make them speak to one another.”
(Jonathan D. Katz, author of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture)
“Grounded in extensive multi-site research, Seex Museums is a far-reaching, original, and timely account of the rhetoric and material practices of the display of erotic materials. Tyburczy draws on her experience as a curator as well as interviews, observation, and archival research to present rich portraits of these often precarious institutions. Deeply engaged with museum studies and queer studies, as well as with work on affect, performance, and empire, Seex Museums grapples intelligently with the paradoxes of exhibiting and archiving seex.”
(Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History)
“The performative nature of Tyburczy’s writing ensures that Seex Museums does not remain a static museum studies text, and instead urges museums and indeed spectators to think more carefully, creatively, and queerly about how diverse seex and seexualities are displayed and navigated in the museum.”
(H-Net Reviews)
“Tyburczy’s Seex Museums hits the sweet hot spot between seexuality studies and museum studies to offer a smart analysis of the politics of the erotic in the public sphere. Read it and teach it if you love art, appreciate the power of representation to change our understandings of the world, and care about the place of seexual and gender minorities in civic space.”
(Susan Stryker, director, Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona)
“Seex Museums is a queer manifesto for museum studies. Curating a grand tour of the museum as the West’s privileged space of display, Tyburczy excavates a genealogy of the recent culture wars while also attending to transnational circuits of capital, seex, and tourism. Offering the intriguing possibility that ‘any museum can be a seex museum,’ this work reorients the history of exhibition in compelling new ways.”
(Molly McGarry, author of Ghosts of Futures Past)
“Seex Museums is a must-read for anyone who loves seex and/or museums. It is an eloquent reminder of how integral performative display of images and objects are to the world outside the museum walls. Tyburczy embarks upon an important exploration of museums as sites of norm-making and offers a valuable critique of ‘choreographies of museumgoing’ which explicitly or implicitly police/censor seex, or the seexually taboo. In Seex Museums, an impressive range of material is covered—from such an American classic work of dissidence like David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly to the creative, yet controversial work of Mexican artists like Rolando De La Rosa’s La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe. Through these, we are able to witness Tyburczy’s consistent attention to the complex interplay between race, seex, gender, and the politics of display. Seex Museums is a model of how history meets theory, how museums studies can meet seexuality studies, and how performance can meet the archive—producing a rich terrain of truly original thought and methodological innovation. With Tyburczy’s eye and careful theorization, she creates her own museum with careful curatorial notes; a rich transnational-transdisciplinary space we are all lucky to explore.”
(Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., author of Seexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing)
“The power of money has been wielded against disturbing depictions, whether through protests against tax-funded obscenity or fears of board members and donors about institutional reputation. Tyburczy presents evidence that the audience(s) for museums may be more open to seexual displays than gatekeepers suppose, but user feedback suggests unanswered questions about what the public expects from a seex museum.”
(Times Higher Education)
