Body Worlds' plastinates, the human/nonhuman interface, and feminism

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4367351
AutoresRebecca Scott (0000-0003-2077-8234, Queen's University, autor correspondente), R E Scott (0000-0002-0069-065X, Queen's University)
Ano2011
Volume12
Fascículo2
Páginas165-181
Data de publicação2011-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700111404246
OpenAlexW1965829586
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas29

Body Worlds is a hugely popular exhibition that claims to offer a reverential and educational experience of the 'real human body' through the display of plastinated dead human bodies. However, because they are posed, staged, and composed of significant nonhuman artifice, plastinates are ambivalently 'real' as human bodies, let alone 'real' as humans. Plastinates are as much nonhuman as human, and neither category fully accounts for them. In this article, I discuss the consequences of this for feminist theory. Approaches in feminist theory that reify, either implicitly or explicitly, a human/nonhuman binary framework are challenged by plastinates. I show that locating plastinates within either ontological category, though not fully accounting for them, enables feminist critiques of the exhibition; however, these categories also paradoxically permit forms of violence with which feminists are typically concerned. In this way, I argue that plastinates force feminist thought to the very interface of the human/nonhuman divide. When applied to Body Worlds, these concepts at best form a heuristic ontological hinge whose angle is determined by ethical and political commitments, illustrating the ways in which key ontologies should be seen as political strategies more or less amenable to feminist goals, but not more or less true. I argue that what lies at the crux of this hinge, in the case of plastinates, is death, and suggest that Body Worlds demands that the interface of death with life become a key feminist concern

Art · Epistemology · Exhibition · Feminism · Feminist theory · Human body · Physical body · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism