4 March 2025, 5:30pm (GMT)
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Hybrid access to be confirmed

This seminar is hosted jointly by the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Dr Mike Sappol, Uppsala University

We are accustomed to reading about queer spaces in art history, sociology, literary scholarship, and LGBTQ+ studies, but not the history of medical and scientific illustration. Yet in centuries past, anatomists made images for study and pedagogy that afford­ed opportunities for erotic, often homoerotic, expression. The anatomical illu­stra­tion could function as a scientific figure and a virtual queer space, the centerpiece 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. Representations of dead and dis­sect­ed bodies and body-parts were a vital part of anatomical methodology. Those images could be soberly technical, but just as often monstrous, flirtatious, provocative, 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. The subject of anatomy had a privileged status, 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 secure knowledge of anatomy, via anatomical dissection, and the study of specimens and illustrations.

Yet our historical actors were reticent, didn’t openly declare their erotic interests. If, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, “closeted-ness itself is a performance ini­ti­a­ted…by the speech act of a silence,” then we need to peer into their textual and representational spaces, decode their words and images and actions. Focusing on widely read and highly regarded atlases and works that danced on the borderline of respectability, Mike Sappol uses distant and close reading, contextualization, genre analysis, and comparison to recover the world of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century queer anatomy.

Mike Sappol works on thevisual culture of medicine and science, and is Visiting Researcher in the History of Science & Ideas at Uppsala University. His latest book is Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics & Desire in the Anatomical Image 1700-1900 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is also the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy & Embodied Social Identity in 19th-century America (2002) and Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration & the Homuncular Subject (2017). Current projects: “Anatomy’s photography: Objectivity, showmanship & the rein­vention of the anatomical image”; “Endangered specimens, unaccountable objects: Historical medical collections and the competing ethical claims upon them.” For downloadable material, go to uppsalauniversitet.academia.edu/MichaelSappol

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.

Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Professor Jackie Stacey

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website

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