CARAS Webinar: Queer Anatomies: Homoerotic Expression and Perverse Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1600-1860. Sunday, June 16, 2024
Queer Anatomies
Homoerotic Expression and Perverse Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1600-1860
Presenter: Mike Sappol, Ph.D.
Sunday, June 16, 2024: 10am-noon (Pacific-Los Angeles) / 1-3pm (Eastern-New York) / 6-8pm (London) / 7-9pm (Central European-Stockholm, Prague, Berlin) - two hours. Please use 1-3pm U.S. Eastern (New York City) as a reference to confirm your local time zone.
To register for this webinar, please visit: https://forms.gle/CJq9UkPmjJT4d6tk7
Continuing Education (CE) credit: n/a
Cost: Attendance is free for all CARAS subscribers, and $25 for others.
Pre-registration is required: Registration will close at 3pm (Pacific) / 6pm (Eastern) on Saturday, June 15, 2024. Please register early.
Abstract
We’re not accustomed to reading about queer spaces in scholarly works on the history of medical and scientific illustration. But hundreds of years ago, anatomists, and the artists they worked with, made scientific images that afforded opportunities for perverse erotic, often homoerotic, pleasure. The anatomical illustration functioned as a virtual queer space, the centerpiece of a men’s club, or the totem of a private or shared closet.
Sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were unmentionables in 18th- and 19th-century European culture, debarred from polite conversation and printed discourse. Yet one scientific discipline — anatomy — had license to represent the intimate details of the human body — rectum and genitals included. Figured within the frame of an illustration — and archived within the pages of a book and the reader’s imagination — printed representations of dead and dissected bodies and body-parts were a vital, often soberly technical, part of the methodology of anatomical science. But anatomical images were just as often monstrous, provocative, flirtatious, playful, theatrical, beautiful. And sensual: anatomical illustrations gave off heat, provided pleasure to the men who produced, gazed upon, and studied them. Some of those men were also collectors of rare books and works of art, and participated in a flourishing homosocial culture of collection and connoisseurship. Anatomy had cultural cachet, was a foundational subject in the curriculum of art and medical pedagogy, and a foundational subject in the encyclopedic curriculum of Enlightenment discourse. Aesthetic discernment, and philosophical, medical and artistic competence, all depended on a more than secure knowledge of anatomy, via anatomical dissection, the study of specimens and illustrations. Which offered unique opportunities for perverse erotic expression and pleasurable viewing.
Focusing on the work of Gautier Dagoty, Joseph Maclise, and other anatomists, this webinar leads participants through a lost archive of queer expression—perverse images of nudes, dissected bodies, penises, vaginas, rectums, hands, and skin, and scenes of connoisseurs gazing rather too fondly upon works of art governed by anatomical principles. Please join us for a discussion that opens up a window onto the erotic imagination of 18th- and 19th-century European medicine.
Advisory: This webinar will present drawings of dead and dissected bodies (mostly naked, mostly male), erect and flaccid penises, open and closed vaginas, buttocks and rectums, in various poses, including bondage.
Learning Objectives
At the end of the webinar, participants will be able to:
Describe the history of anatomy and its role in medical and art pedagogy.
Discuss moral policing in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America, and rules that separated polite speech and discourse from overt (and sometimes covert) expression of erotic desire and pleasure.
Assess the relationship between historical and current rules governing representation of embodied sexual practices.
Presentation Content Level: Introductory - Intermediate. This webinar will provide an introduction to the topic but also provide an opportunity for discussion at a more advanced level that presupposes basic knowledge of alternative sexualities communities.
About the Presenter
Michael Sappol was born in Queens, New York, and currently lives in Stockholm. He is Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a historian of the visual culture and performance of medicine and science, with a focus on anatomy and the Body. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002), Body Modern (2017), and numerous other works. His most recent work, Queer Anatomies will be published in August 2024. For more info and downloadable articles, see https://uppsalauniversitet.academia.edu/MichaelSappol
References
Sources
J.-B.-M. Bourgery & N.-H. Jacob, Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme (Paris, 1831-54).
William Cheselden, Anatomy of the Humane Body (London, 1713; many later editions).
Jacques Gamelin, Nouveau recueil d'ostéologie et de myologie… (Toulouse, 1779).
J-F Gautier [Dagoty] & [J-F-M] Duverney, Myologie complette… (Paris, 1746).
___, Dissertation au sujet de la fameuse Hermaphrodite… (Paris, 1749).
___, Anatomie des parties de la génération de l’homme et de la femme (Paris, 1773).
Bernardino Genga, Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno… (Rome, 1691).
Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, Lately Existing at Isernia in the Kingdom of Naples (London, 1786).
Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy (1st English ed., London, 1851; 2d ed., 1856) (1st American ed., Philadelphia, 1851).
Richard Quain & Joseph Maclise, The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (London, 1844).
Adrianus Spigelius, De humani corporis fabrica libri… (Amsterdam, 1627).
___, De formato foetu liber singularis aeneis figuris exornatus (Padua, 1612-31).
Philip C. Van Buskirk, Diaries, 1851–1902, University of Washington. Transcription, Philip C. Van Buskirk Archive.
Scholarship
B.R. Burg, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk 1851–1870 (New Haven, 1994).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York,1990).
Romana Byrne, Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (New York, 2013).
Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty (New York, 2010).
James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York, 1996).
Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine (Manchester, 2017).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; trans. Alan Sheridan Smith, 1973).
___, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York, 1973).
David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago, 1991).
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, 2011).
Rosemary Hennessy, “The Material of Sex,” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (London, 2013).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; Berkeley, 2008).
___, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).
Leo Steinberg, “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” October 25 (1983): 1-217.
Jenny Sundén, “Digital Kink Obscurity: A Sexual Politics Beyond Visibility & Comprehension,” Sexualities (2023).
Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (Berkeley, 2013).
About the CARAS Education Program
For information about the CARAS Education Program, please visit https://caras-researchlink.org/education