“The sexual policies of museum visiting. How does the imaginary of a family visit produces a heteronormative script?”

As part of a research on the reappropriation and adaptation of video games in the museum, we studied an exhibition of video games in a science center. This doesn’t seem to be a space for sexual representations. However, a heteronormative script underlies the exhibition, shapes the production of the objects and their framework of use, and sometimes leads to inequalities during the visit. This script emerges during the exhibition’s production, when curators imagine the future public by picturing a hetero-marital and family visit. It does not completely determine the modalities of the visit, but helps to frame it, and offers possibilities of action by privileging preferential uses.

Based on a year-and-a-half-long fieldwork, we are interested here in the design processes of the exhibition and its interactive installations, in order to report on the daily practices of the design team. We seek to understand, on the one hand, how this heterosexual script emerges and, on the other hand, how this heterosexual norm materializes in both organizational practices and technical devices.)