In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Jean Honoré Fragonard, perhaps the most significant French painter of the eighteenth century, was condemned first as a purveyor of luxury items and later as an artist who abandoned noble subjects for the erotic genre. In this revisionist, art-historical study, Mary D. Sheriff challenges such pejorative views of Fragonard by arguing that he is better understood as an artist whose unsurpassed technical skill and witty manipulation of academic standards established a dynamic relation with the audience his art both courted and created.

Sheriff begins her inquiry with an appraisal of Fragonard criticism, followed by an extensive and thoroughly original reading of selected works by Fragonard and of the eroticism encoded in them. Art and eroticism converge in a discussion of execution, in which Sheriff explores the changing conception of execution and elucidates its complex rhetorical and cultural underpinnings. Drawing on analytic methods from contemporary critical theory and an understanding of each work's cultural milieu, Sheriff pays particular attention throughout to the relation between beholder and work of art, which she views as manifest in the artist's preoccupation with the play between the real and the fictive. Scholars and students of art history, eighteenth-century culture and history, critical theory, literary criticism, and all those drawn to the work of this great French painter will find this work essential reading.

Winner of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies

All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics—what she calls queer curatorship—for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century.

Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context—from its inception to the present—marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.