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Chapter three transitions to temporary and explicit displays of queer sexuality in museums, specifically examining how the emotional habitus on sexual display is managed through unofficial museum policy in the late twentieth century. This period, sometimes referred to as the “culture wars,” marks a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of certain sexual display policies such as warning signs that continue to influence the ways in which sexual material culture is consumed in museums. The final section of the chapter juxtaposes the politics and performances of display in temporary sex exhibitions in mainstream museums to the controversy surrounding the display of sex toys at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. This section examines what happens to queer sex when it is displayed in a museum dedicated to representing queer lives and what this means for the application of queer theory in museum practice. The chapter ends by examining theoretical ruminations on the supposed death of queer theory and argues that now is not the time to abandon queer theory, and that now more than ever, theorists and museum practitioners need queer praxis.

Analyzes the multiplication of autobiographical subjects in Rechy’s memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman) as well as in his fiction, an interactive CD-ROM he helped produce, and performance art inspired by Rechy. These texts revolve around queer communal spaces, prefiguring contemporary theoretical work by Samuel Delaney and Judith/Jack Halberstam. Though Rechy and his characters claim to be narcissists, a vast web of connections links them to a cacophonous network of people, streets, parks, bars, animals, deserts, dirt, and garbage. Landscapes and seemingly marginal characters take the foreground at points and blend with the life of the supposedly central male protagonist. These blended agencies, the author argues, depersonalize the self.

This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)

The introduction shows how all museums are already sex museums and makes periodization claims on how and why the book pinpoints key museum events to trace and structure a genealogy of debates about sex in museums. It defines key terms such “performance,” “museum,” “sex,” and “display” with display conceived of as a technique for disciplining sexuality both within and outside museums. The introduction also shows how the history of the normalizing force of the museum has always been paralleled by another history—a queer history—one in which the display of unruly objects of non-normative sex (and risk-taking curators) rebel against museum norms. Thus, in addition to forging a genealogy of the normalizing influence of the museum on the history of sexuality, the introduction also foregrounds display as a materialization of queer theory and as a form of queer praxis. The author’s methodology is likewise described as “queer praxis,” an interdisciplinary methodology for curatorial labor in museums and a mode for understanding the work of queer scholars through grounded research methods such as ethnography, interviews, participant observation, and self-reflexive approaches to archival research.

The cultural and rhetorical influences of globalization work in multiple directions on the display of sexual cultures. This chapter focuses on the influence of popular U.S. culture and discourse on El Museo del Sexo (MuseXo) in Mexico City as the curators’ approach to museum signage allowed for an analysis of the flow of sexual ideas and objects in this direction. Taking a cue from MuseXo’s displays, the author focuses on the ways in which US-Mexico relations, specifically in the wake of the cultural exchanges facilitated by the signing of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, may have contributed to the new discourse of sexual identities for the practicing sexual subject in Mexico City today. The chapter critiques the circulation of global queer discourse in Mexico City to interrogate the processes by which sexual rhetorics, particularly those oriented toward homonormative versions of Western gay consciousness and the LGBT political movements of the United States, are received and appropriated. The author refers to the transnational codification of sexual identity discourse as the “sexual modern” and proposes the use of this term to refer to (homo)normative display practices that textually manifest prescriptive sets of social codes for articulating cosmopolitan queer subjectivity.

Queer scholarship has emphasized the construction, interpretation, and development of archives and has foregrounded the politics of historiography. This final chapter brings these fields together in order to suggest and model a curatorial tactic that grounds queer theory in a register of actual practice called “queer curatorship.” Queer curatorship is as an experimental display method that stages alternative spatial configurations for two distinct purposes: to expose how traditional museums socialize heteronormative relationships between objects and visitors; and to cope with ethically fraught objects of queer cultures—which in this chapter takes the form of leather whips as objects with historical ties to both gay leather/kink culture and antebellum slavery. Chapter six unpacks this method for displaying the history of sexuality and analyzes the histories of eroticism and discipline as they crisscross on the surfaces of two objects: an eight-minute, experimental film by Isaac Julien called The Attendant and a sword sheath and whip that was discovered at the Leather Archives & Museum and that is believed to have been used as an instrument of nonconsensual torture on an antebellum Louisiana plantation.

This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of seeking ART (Mamo 2007, 2013; Armuand et al., 2017). The bioprecarity of queer and transgender people is produced by the enactment of certain kinds of categorical framing (Foucault 1966, 1976; Summerville, 1998) in the laws regulating ARTs. Prohibitive laws in some states are often circumvented by going abroad. This chapter therefore argues that queer and trans people’s bioprecarity also results from the intimate labour queer and transgender people have to undertake to overcome prohibitive laws and hetero- and cisnormative medical institutions as shown e.g. in studies about trans people’s experiences with ART (James-Abra et al., 2015, Armuand et al., 2017).

This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships of various sorts. John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic New Englander and World War II veteran, queer by experience and self-identification, wrote The Gallery, widely acclaimed upon its 1947 publication as one of the best novels inspired by the war. Distinctive in its innovative structure, its graceful expression, and its not needing scenes of battle to capture war’s trauma, the novel, set in Naples, was also singular in its depiction of men’s intimacy--in particular, but not only, among men like Burns himself who had sex with each other. Though some critics denounced the novel’s sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, this new topic and attitude within American fiction was largely either acclaimed or simply ignored. In contrasting American and Italian cultures, the novel was also distinctive in its sweeping critique of modern life, with Burns heralded as a rising star. The chapter is largely based on Burns’s extensive war correspondence, every review The Gallery received, and the author’s interviews with Burns’s surviving younger brother, himself also a veteran of the war.

The Mourning After closes with a provocative interpretation of the content and continuing popularity of John Knowles’s 1959 novel A Separate Peace. Much like Knowles himself, whose queer sexuality was mostly unacknowledged during his lifetime, the powerful attachment between the novel’s two main characters, boys in late adolescence on the verge of World War II service, has rarely been seen for what it clearly is, says Ibson, a male love story of rare power and grace. Love and sex between American males and females would soon be much more openly acknowledged and celebrated in American literature and life, during the 1960s and beyond; but in mainstream America the closet door would remain closed tightly for a much longer time for those drawn to members of their own sex.

This chapter describes the formative importance of the Uncle Go columns in Plaek for the origins of gay and lesbian community publishing in Thailand. The decline and end of the Uncle Go columns is also noted. The importance of commercial print media in the development of Thailand’s gay, lesbian and transgender (kathoey) cultures and communities is detailed.

This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, but are also those that elude while stabilizing meaning. In other words, at the moment we examine the Rocky Horror Picture Show or an online dating site, we establish a set of assumptions regarding who people are; yet, we develop this interplay of subjectivities that presumptively iterates binaries without ever challenging how heterosexuality is nothing more than a construction of the masculine ideal. The chapter beckons us to not get too comfortable with our learned sense that we know what masculinity is. It turns our assumptions regarding masculinity topsy-turvy and forces us to recognize that whether you are a Rasta, rude boy, martial artist, womanizer, athlete, or soldier, masculinities are defined social constructions that vary across culture, context, and community.