Museum bodies: the politics and practices of visiting and viewing

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.