Sex in the Museum

Catalog description

This course maps the often fraught intercourse between the history of sexuality and the history of museums, exhibitions, and curation. Bodies have long been the mainstay of art, but the attribution of sex to those bodies is a highly variable social phenomenon that tells us as much about the culture in question as it does about ourselves. Sex is thus in the eye of the beholder, defined by cultural, religious, scientific, and political norms, themselves often defined in and through a politics of visibility and exhibition. Beginning in the ancient world and moving into the present, this course studies the sexual politics of display, inherent but little studied, in the history of art history. From Renaissance battles over fig leaves to Enlightenment Europe’s titillation at what they saw as the unbridled eroticism of the ancient world to the culture wars of today, sex has long been a hidden motor of shifts in the art world. Whether coming to understand the so-called “Free Body Culture” of turn of the 20th century Europe with its very public nudity, to the explosion in nude performance in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s in the USA over an art that addressed queerness, AIDS, and their intersection, we’ll see how often exhibitions have served as proxy for other social and political issues. In this course we’ll also come to understand the distinction between the nude, a category in art, and the naked, a category that was often said to corrupt art. Reading the latest work in queer, feminist and anti-racist scholarship, we will see how easily bodies on display can turn into sex, and conversely, slip as easily back from sex into bodies again.