Erotic Surgery

Porn Studies, 2014

This paper explores the intersections between medical and pornographic visuality as they appear in the works of two trans-historical, innovative visual practitioners: sixteenth-century medical illustrator Charles Estienne (1504-1564), and twentieth/twenty-first-century porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle (1954-present). Both Estienne and Sprinkle adopt pornography as a representational strategy for re-imagining and re-presenting bodies that have been penetrated, opened, or altered by medical acts. By combining scientific modes of looking with pornographic imagery, they visualize dissected anatomical figures as sexual collages while questioning whether medicalized bodies remain sexual ones. Ultimately, their erotic anatomies illustrate how pornography can function as a type of visual strategy that allows for new ways to see human bodies and come to terms with medical interventions.

Social History of Medicine, 2012

review of Stephens, Anatomy as Spectacle [on 19th-century popular anatomical museums]

Honours Thesis UTAS, 2012

Within La Specola Museum in Florence, Italy, there are several rooms dedicated to the study of human anatomy as understood by the scientific community at the latter end of the 1700s. The anatomical wax figures were created by artisans working for the museum and amongst them are female anatomical sculptural figures, often referred to as Anatomical Venuses, which provide a substantial survey of the maternal body describing the chronology of gestation and birth. Traditional feminist response has highlighted the eroticism of these Anatomical Venuses and the inferior position of woman as the passive object of the male gaze. However, when viewed in vivo, it is evident that the artefacts are much more than objects for male voyeurism. Within the context of the museum, the figures provide detailed observation of the reproductive cycle and reference contemporaneous imagery. Furthermore, female and male figures are similarly presented, supine, in glass cases on silk beds, aestheticized and beautiful. This research thus questions the adequacy of the feminist approach as a means of evaluating the Anatomical Venuses or similar contemporary works which reference this genre.

"Imagens do Corpo na Ciência a na Arte", C. Tavares (Ed.) , 2012

The Body and the Arts, 2009

British Art Studies, 2021

Joseph Maclise (1815–91), a gifted surgeon, anatomist, and medical illustrator of mid-19th-century Britain, left behind a corpus of brilliant, idiosyncratic anatomical images, and opinionated commentaries, but almost no evidence of social interactions or affective relations. Homoerotic desire was heavily policed in Maclise’s time. Given the conditions under which the archive was created (or suppressed, or lost, or shamed into reticence), we can never know with certainty what he intended or felt, or what his readers received—but we do have a rich evidentiary base of visual materials. Using narrative history, close readings of images and texts, detailed comparisons with other illustrated anatomies, and open-ended theoretical and methodological approaches (a mash-up of queer theory, Foucault, gaze theory, genre analysis, and contextualization)—an argument is joined: an image can be a closet and a queer space. Maclise’s drawings, ostensibly designed to contribute to the improvement of medical knowledge, theory, and practice, show good-looking young men and cadaveric bodies in various states of dissection. Penises, testicles, anuses, faces, sensuous hands on skin are crisply rendered in illusionistic perspective, with a highly cultivated aestheticism—often without any relevance to the anatomical topic discussed—and little attention is paid to the female body. In historical context, and from our 21st-century vantage point, the hypothesis of homoerotic investment leads to productive interpretations. This article poses more questions than answers but comes to rest with this: it is plausible and meaningful to take Maclise’s anatomical illustrations, and the figures depicted therein, as queer objects of queer desire.

Special Issue: ‘‘Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modifications’, Social Semiotics, Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2007, pp.341-359, 2007

Museum History Journal, 2009

Effigies, facsimiles, and replicas were common features of nineteenth-century cultures of display. Medical museums in particular housed numerous models in media such as glass and plaster; the closest in appearance to human flesh for anatomical representation, however, was wax. This paper explores the role of ceroplastica in British anatomy museums through the wax bodies of Joseph Towne, modeler at Guy's Hospital Museum in London. Towne's processes and products were distinct from his European predecessors in ways that reveal not only the contingencies of museum practice, but also the particular place of wax in the Victorian exhibitionary complex. 2 See for example the papers in S. de Chadarevian and N. Hopwood (eds.), Models: the third dimension in science.