Full Description
Since its Tokyo debut in 1995, Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition has been visited by more than 25 million people at museums and science centers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Preserved through von Hagens' unique process of plastination, the bodies shown in the controversial exhibit are posed to mimic life and art, from a striking re-creation of Rodin's The Thinker, to a preserved horse and its human rider, a basketball player, and a reclining pregnant woman--complete with fetus in its eighth month. This interdisciplinary volume analyzes Body Worlds from a number of perspectives, describing the legal, ethical, sociological, and religious concerns which seem to accompany the exhibition as it travels the world.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ALICITA RODRÍGUEZ AND JOSEPH STARR
Section One: A Beauty Salon for Bodily Interiors
The Plastinates' Narrative
JOSEPH STARR
Afterlife, but Not as We Know It: Melancholy, Post-Biological Ontology, and Plastinated Bodies
NATALIA LIZAMA
Locating the Sublime
LISA NEVÁREZ
Take Me: The Rhetoric of Donation
AVIVA BRIEFEL
Individualist Etiologies: Environmental Health, Biological Risk, and Medical Display
REBECCA ONION
Section Two: The Usual Gruesome Anatomical Apparitions
The Persistence of Tradition in Anatomical Museums
STEPHEN JOHNSON
Illuminating the Soul: Panopticism and the Freak Show
PEDRO PONCE
The Amethyst Seal: Anatomy and Identity in Bentham and von Hagens
PATRICIA PIERSON
Section Three: The Resurrection of Excoriated Bodies
Affecting Bodies
NATALIE LOVELESS
Worrying About Democratic Values: Body Worlds in German Context, 1996-2004
PETER M. MCISAAC
The Echo of German Horror Films
ALEXANDRA LUDEWIG
Touching the Corpse: The Unmaking of Memory in the Body Museum
ULI LINKE
Section Four: Disharmonious Bodily Openings
Forced Impregnation and Masculinist Utopia
T. CHRISTINE JESPERSEN AND ALICITA RODRÍGUEZ
The Politics of Fetal Display
CHRISTIAN DUCOMB
Corpse-less: A Battle with Abjection
ELIZABETH SIMON RUCHTI
Section Five: Aesthetic and Instructive but Not Morally Offensive
Anatomy Without Integrity
RUTH LEVY GUYER
Adoration, Veneration, Plastination: Theo-Liturgical Reflections
PAUL WOJDA
Twilife: The Art and Science of Consuming Death
LUCIA TANASSI
Emergent Bodies: Human, All Too Human, Posthuman
ARA OSTERWEIL and DAVID BAUMFLEK
About the Contributors
Index
