Sexual Mobilities, Cosmopolitanism, and Cultural Capital: Same-Sex Materials in Sex Museums

• In Event: Queer Media Mobilities

Abstract

This paper explores the mobility and exhibition of same-sex materials in sex museums in Asia, Europe, and North America. How does the movement of sexual ideas, materials, and media, as well as tourists and curators interested in sexuality, generate cultural and economic capital? Drawing on field visits to 22 sites and interviews with personnel in many of these, I consider the cosmopolitan claims made both in the signage and by curators to situate same sex sexualities as deserving of equal inclusion. I focus on three case studies to examine the fundamental claims of cosmopolitanism: individual rights, equality, and universalism. Despite the best intentions of these museums, how they exhibit same sex materials reveals the Western and heteronormative assumptions underpinning classical cosmopolitanism: the universal subject is male, white, heterosexual, and Western; equality is based on individual rights rather than collective claims; and universalism requires selective amnesia about the histories of colonial expansion that included sexual subjection. Moreover, cosmopolitanism becomes a form of consumption, where museums display minority sexual materials for majoritarian visitors to enhance their cultural capital. Sexual and geographic mobilities nevertheless also produce unexpected frictions among materials, visitors, and spaces that open queer contact zones for unpredictable and potentially nonnormative engagements.

Author

• Katherine Sender, U of Michigan - Ann Arbor