{"id":2276,"date":"2024-11-29T10:05:31","date_gmt":"2024-11-29T10:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/chstm\/?p=2276"},"modified":"2025-04-16T11:55:46","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T10:55:46","slug":"cssc-and-chstm-joint-research-seminar-4-march-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/chstm\/2024\/11\/29\/cssc-and-chstm-joint-research-seminar-4-march-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"CSSC and CHSTM Joint Research Seminar, 4 March 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

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4 March 2025, 5:30pm (GMT)
Simon Building, Room 2.60 [maps and travel]<\/a>
Online: https:\/\/zoom.us\/j\/92573634182<\/a><\/p>\n

This seminar is hosted jointly by the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture<\/strong><\/a> and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Mike Sappol, Uppsala University<\/h2>\n
\n

Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and perverse desire in the anatomical image; or
The Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

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 afford\u00aded opportunities for erotic, often homoerotic, expression. The anatomical illu\u00adstra\u00adtion could function as a scientific figure and a virtual queer space, the centerpiece of a private or shared closet.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 anatomy \u2014 had license to represent the intimate details of the human body \u2014 rec\u00adtum and geni\u00adtals included. Representations of dead and dis\u00adsect\u00aded 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.<\/p>\n

Yet our historical actors were reticent, didn\u2019t openly declare their erotic interests. If, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, \u201ccloseted-ness itself is a performance ini\u00adti\u00ada\u00adted\u2026by the speech act of a silence,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Mike Sappol<\/b>\u00a0works on thevisual culture of medicine and science, and is Visiting Researcher in the History of Science & Ideas at Uppsala University. His latest book is\u00a0Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics & Desire in the Anatomical Image 1700-1900<\/i>\u00a0(Bloomsbury, 2024). He is also the author of\u00a0A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy & Embodied Social Identity in 19th-century America<\/i>\u00a0<\/b>(2002) and\u00a0<\/span>Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration & the Homuncular Subject<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>(2017). Current projects: \u201cAnatomy\u2019s photography: Objectivity, showmanship & the rein\u00advention of the anatomical image\u201d; \u201cEndangered specimens, unaccountable objects: Historical medical collections and the competing ethical claims upon them.\u201d For downloadable material, go to uppsalauniversitet.academia.edu\/MichaelSappol<\/a><\/p>\n

All welcome! Please come along if you are interested in the topic.<\/p>\n

Convenors: Professor Carsten Timmermann and Professor Jackie Stacey<\/p>\n

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website<\/a><\/p>\n

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Related<\/h1>\n

Related posts:<\/h3>
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Planetary Futures: Rethinking Extinction and Conservation in the Anthropocene<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a>
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CHSTM Research Seminar, 8 December 2026<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a>
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CHSTM Research Seminar 3 December 2024<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a><\/div>
<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

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