Queer Anatomies: Anatomical Illustration, Perverse Desire and the Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet: A Live Zoom Lecture by Historian Michael Sappol
Date: Tuesday, May 12
Time: 5:30 pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE.
This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 3 pm EDT the day of the lecture, after which a link to the conference will be emailed to ticketholders. Ticketholders may request a recording of the lecture with proof of purchase by emailing info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com.
PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.
We’re accustomed to reading about queer spaces in cultural geography, art history, sociology, literary studies, and queer theory, but not in the scholarship on anatomical representation. Focusing on the 18th- and 19th-century surgical anatomical plates of William Cheselden, Jacques Fabien Gautier D’Agoty, J.B.M. Bourgery, N.H. Jacob, Richard Quain and Joseph Maclise, this profusely illustrated lecture proposes that over the centuries anatomical illustration has been mobilized to serve as a queer space and a closet. If so, this in turn provides us with an opportunity to think anew about desire, aesthetics, and the queerness of the anatomical object, in the medical library and anatomical atlas, and on the dissecting table.
Michael Sappol is Visiting Researcher at the Department of the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was previously Historian and Scholar-in-Residence in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) and Dream Anatomy (2006), and co-editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (2010). His latest book is Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homuncular Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Click here for CV & links to selected works.
Image: Dissection of the groin, femoral vein and inguinal lymph nodes, Joseph Maclise, 1856