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Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 145

museum visitors are subject to disciplinary technologies. Rarely are museum visitors
allowed to touch exhibits, except under very special conditions. Sight is the privi-
leged sense, and visitors are asked to understand themselves as contemplative eyes
(Rose 2007). Guards and cameras monitor visitors’ behaviour, and signs tell them
what they can and cannot do. The museum routes visitors in specifi c ways, so even
though there may be no physical impediments to their walking one way or another,

traffic will be encouraged to flow according to a plan. Rooms may be numbered,

arrows marked on floors or walls or the features of the building design may lead
visitors to entrances and exits. Benches in front of pieces the museum considers im-
portant act as cues for visitors to spend a longer time in those rooms. Lidchi (1997)
argued that at every point, curators, designers and technicians must make choices
about which objects to display, how to display them and what information to put
on accompanying panels for the visitor to have a meaningful journey through the
museum. However, she observed that these choices will always be ‘in part “repres-
sive”, in the sense that they direct the visitor towards certain interpretations and
understandings, opening certain doors to meaning but inevitably closing off others’
(Lidchi 1997: 170).
Divisions between the producers and consumers of knowledge are also built into
the fabric of the museum. There are partitions between the public displays and pri-

vate areas for stores and archives, offices and service areas. Visitors are expected
to keep to their place. The positioning of the shop or café also constructs the sub-
jectivity of the visitor in a particular way, shifting his or her identity from that of a
spectator within a public institution to that of a privatised consumer. There are often
continuities within the display of goods in a museum shop and the display of arte-
facts within the museum itself, making the identity shift appear seamless.
Museums construct ways of knowing particular worlds. As a result, they construct
the visitor as someone who is charged with understanding that knowledge. It is no
coincidence, therefore, that museums appeal to those whose educational background

makes them confident in this environment, and Dicks (2003) has discussed the nu-
merous studies that show that museums appeal most to people with elevated educa-
tional qualifications. Fyfe and Ross (1996: 133) suggested that museum visiting is,

in fact, a strategy ‘by which some people accumulate cultural capital and others do
not’. This observation echoes the study conducted by Bourdieu and Darbel in the
1960s which found that ‘working-class visitors to art museums experience them as
a test—which they fail—of their cultural capital, and hence learn to devalue their
own taste’ (Dicks 2003: 161). The way the exhibition is constructed makes assump-
tions about the knowledge, educational background and tastes of the visitors, making
some visitors feel included and others excluded. Sport museums, however, make an
interesting case in this regard. Knowledge of sport has not been regarded as high
culture in the way that the arts have been revered. As a result, sport museums may be
more interested in addressing a wider community of visitors than most. Nevertheless,
sports are strongly coded by class, gender and race and construct cultural competence