ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 looks specifically at visitor engagements with house museums (stately homes, country houses, presidential houses and plantations). The dominant heritage-making performance undertaken by visitors is that of ‘reinforcement’ and, in particular, the conservative variant of the performance of reinforcement identified in Chapter 9. The register of engagement underpinning this performance is a low-intensity and banal sense of cosy and bucolic comfort. The house museums in England, Australia and the United States are analysed separately to identify the specific affective work that visiting does in addressing and soothing national anxieties while maintaining and emotionally legitimising the status quo. One of the consequences of the house museum performance of reinforcement is the perpetuation of indifference to the historical and contemporary experiences of social diversity and exclusion.
