Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.
The museum today faces complex questions of definition, representation, ethics, aspiration and economic survival. Alongside this we see burgeoning use of an array of new media including increasingly dynamic web portals and content, digital archives, social networks, blogs and online games. At the heart of this are changes to the idea of ‘visitor’ and ‘audience’ and their participation and representation in the new cultural sphere. This insightful book unpacks a number of contradictions that help to frame and articulate digital media work in the museum and questions what constitutes authentic participation. Based on original empirical research and a range of case studies the author explores questions about the museum as media from a number of different disciplines and shows that across museums and the study of them, the cultural logic is changing.
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