Panel 1: Dissecting Bodies
Exploring the opening of physical bodies, this first panel addresses questions about the symbolism and ethical significance of dissected human bodies and slaughtered animal bodies. What relationships emerge from (and are problematised by) such practices, and what do we learn about being human(e)?
Dorrie Imeson: A medical student's perspective on human dissection
Human dissection represents for many a challenging and contentious aspect of medical practice. Developments in the practice of human dissection and how such developments are perceived within society are intimately linked with contemporaneous conceptualizations of the body. Underpinning many discourses around the practice of human dissection is the idea of a disconnection between the dissector and the body being dissected - a sentiment reflected in the following quote, taken from a discussion with medical students regarding the practice of cadaveric dissection: “Becoming emotionally involved would be like a smokescreen to my learning - as long as I don’t see it (the donor body) as a person, then I’m OK”. This student has disconnected from the cultural and emotional significance of the donor body and conceptualizes it more as an abstract tool for her learning. This may be viewed as a somewhat aberrant and de-humanistic treatment of the body after death; however some studies would suggest this is not an uncommon response within medical education. Is this disconnection between the dissector and the donor body necessary in facilitating the otherwise culturally subversive act of desecrating the human body and can we find its origins in the history of anatomical dissection?
Human dissection represents for many a challenging and contentious aspect of medical practice. Developments in the practice of human dissection and how such developments are perceived within society are intimately linked with contemporaneous conceptualizations of the body. Underpinning many discourses around the practice of human dissection is the idea of a disconnection between the dissector and the body being dissected - a sentiment reflected in the following quote, taken from a discussion with medical students regarding the practice of cadaveric dissection: “Becoming emotionally involved would be like a smokescreen to my learning - as long as I don’t see it (the donor body) as a person, then I’m OK”. This student has disconnected from the cultural and emotional significance of the donor body and conceptualizes it more as an abstract tool for her learning. This may be viewed as a somewhat aberrant and de-humanistic treatment of the body after death; however some studies would suggest this is not an uncommon response within medical education. Is this disconnection between the dissector and the donor body necessary in facilitating the otherwise culturally subversive act of desecrating the human body and can we find its origins in the history of anatomical dissection?
Andrew Ball: "Touching the body and animal slaughter in modernity"
Art critic John Berger, in ‘Looking at Animals’ (1977) claimed that with industrial forms of modernity, animals only appear as ‘symbols’ - in zoos and as pets - ‘as living monuments to their disappearance’. This paper will argue that new sites of human-animal interaction actually emerged, highlighting the example of animal slaughter in modernity, and, largely sidestepping sight, it will look at whether it was necessarily ethical to ‘touch’ a body, and in what senses are such bodies ‘untouchable’. It will examine this in two ways: firstly, to look at the relationship between the shifting (touched?) values and material practices of animal slaughter, allowing an assessment into why such bodies were touched/untouched; secondly, to address the question as to how a historian may ‘touch’ animals in history.
Following a brief overview of the major shifts in animal slaughter, the paper will take aim at the calls for public slaughterhouses and the debates surrounding the stunning of animals prior to slaughter from 1880 to the present day. How these relate to the notion of the ‘humane’ and its relationship to changing animal bodies will be the driving force in answering the broader questions.
Art critic John Berger, in ‘Looking at Animals’ (1977) claimed that with industrial forms of modernity, animals only appear as ‘symbols’ - in zoos and as pets - ‘as living monuments to their disappearance’. This paper will argue that new sites of human-animal interaction actually emerged, highlighting the example of animal slaughter in modernity, and, largely sidestepping sight, it will look at whether it was necessarily ethical to ‘touch’ a body, and in what senses are such bodies ‘untouchable’. It will examine this in two ways: firstly, to look at the relationship between the shifting (touched?) values and material practices of animal slaughter, allowing an assessment into why such bodies were touched/untouched; secondly, to address the question as to how a historian may ‘touch’ animals in history.
Following a brief overview of the major shifts in animal slaughter, the paper will take aim at the calls for public slaughterhouses and the debates surrounding the stunning of animals prior to slaughter from 1880 to the present day. How these relate to the notion of the ‘humane’ and its relationship to changing animal bodies will be the driving force in answering the broader questions.
Panel 2: Marginalised Bodies
Taking literary explorations of diffracted and 'othered' identities as the starting point, this panel encourages reflection on the (de)constructions of differences that may be manifested on the body, and that may be both touchable and untouchable in multiple ways.
Hannah Murray: ‘What had become of me?’: The Untouchable Black Body and Racial Liminality in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee
This paper discusses the representation of the untouchable black body in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836). In the novel, Sheppard, a disembodied ghost, enters the bodies of six different men, including a slave. Furthering recent criticism on the novel’s depiction of slavery, I specifically focus on Sheppard’s supernatural transformation into Virginia slave Tom to argue for a reading of Sheppard as racially liminal.
First, I argue that the black body of the novel is an educational and entertaining visual spectacle for white audiences. Through blackface performances, abolitionist imagery and medical experiment, the black body is rendered untouchable, Othered and monstrous, and at the same time conquerable, knowable and imitable.
In touching the untouchable—Tom’s Othered corpse—I argue that Sheppard becomes racially liminal. Problematizing dualist thought, Sheppard embodies racist stereotypes of Tom as childlike, savage and stupid, characteristics that the text positions as residing in the black body itself. Through Sheppard’s alignment with an enslaved and disenfranchised self, I will contend that the novel speaks to wider anxieties concerning the fragility of white identity in antebellum society.
This paper discusses the representation of the untouchable black body in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836). In the novel, Sheppard, a disembodied ghost, enters the bodies of six different men, including a slave. Furthering recent criticism on the novel’s depiction of slavery, I specifically focus on Sheppard’s supernatural transformation into Virginia slave Tom to argue for a reading of Sheppard as racially liminal.
First, I argue that the black body of the novel is an educational and entertaining visual spectacle for white audiences. Through blackface performances, abolitionist imagery and medical experiment, the black body is rendered untouchable, Othered and monstrous, and at the same time conquerable, knowable and imitable.
In touching the untouchable—Tom’s Othered corpse—I argue that Sheppard becomes racially liminal. Problematizing dualist thought, Sheppard embodies racist stereotypes of Tom as childlike, savage and stupid, characteristics that the text positions as residing in the black body itself. Through Sheppard’s alignment with an enslaved and disenfranchised self, I will contend that the novel speaks to wider anxieties concerning the fragility of white identity in antebellum society.
Hannah Goddard: Demythologising Gender? Sexual Difference and Deconstruction in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve
In her much quoted essay ‘Notes from the Front Line’, British writer Angela Carter discusses ‘my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman’ and her subsequent interest in interrogating how ‘that social fiction of my “femininity” was created [...] and palmed off on me as the real thing’. Her fictions consequently take it upon themselves to examine the preponderance in society of ‘extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’. One such ‘lie’ which is exposed again and again in Carter’s work is the naturalisation of constructed gender identities and the hierarchical structure of this binary sexual difference. This paper explores whether such ‘demythologising’ is also deconstructive, or if instead Carter’s attempts to destabilise binary gender relations in fact reinforce them. With this uncertainty in mind, this paper focusses on her 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve and examines its engagement with the ontological status of sexual difference, and how the gendered body is rendered, destabilised and reformed in her work and in Derridean deconstruction.
In her much quoted essay ‘Notes from the Front Line’, British writer Angela Carter discusses ‘my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman’ and her subsequent interest in interrogating how ‘that social fiction of my “femininity” was created [...] and palmed off on me as the real thing’. Her fictions consequently take it upon themselves to examine the preponderance in society of ‘extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’. One such ‘lie’ which is exposed again and again in Carter’s work is the naturalisation of constructed gender identities and the hierarchical structure of this binary sexual difference. This paper explores whether such ‘demythologising’ is also deconstructive, or if instead Carter’s attempts to destabilise binary gender relations in fact reinforce them. With this uncertainty in mind, this paper focusses on her 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve and examines its engagement with the ontological status of sexual difference, and how the gendered body is rendered, destabilised and reformed in her work and in Derridean deconstruction.
Panel 3: Psychological-Spiritual Bodies
This final panel explores ideas broadly associated with the Ancient Greek notion of 'psyche', which literally translates as 'soul', but also is used in more psychological applications. What discussions of health - both social and spiritual/religious - might emerge from these understandings?
Rosie Edgley: Is it possible to be liberated while embodied? An Indian philosophical perspective
Who am I? What is my body? Am I my body? These questions are at the heart of Indian philosophy. Śaṃkara (7th century CE), the founder of the Advaita Vedānta (non-dualist) school of philosophy, holds that these questions are answered in the Upaniṣadic sentence, tat tvaṃ asi (‘you are that’).
The body, for Śaṃkara, is part of an illusory external world. This external world is superimposed on reality giving the false impression of identity and association (between the self and the body). Liberation for Śaṃkara, however, is realisation that your true self ultimately is Brahman (God) – this identity needs only to be realised in order for you to be liberated and for superimposition to be removed. However, Śaṃkara also holds that being liberated while embodied (jīvanmukti) is possible. This begs the question, how then can one be liberated while still embodied? Moreover, why might one remain embodied after liberation?
This paper seeks to answer some of these questions by analysing Śaṃkara’s non-dualistic worldview in conjunction with the possibility of being liberated while still embodied. While I argue that liberation while still living is necessary for Śaṃkara, I also argue that the possibility of being liberated while embodied is not ultimately compatible with a non-dualistic worldview. Jīvanmukti therefore, for Śaṃkara and the school of non-dualism, poses a fundamental problem.
Who am I? What is my body? Am I my body? These questions are at the heart of Indian philosophy. Śaṃkara (7th century CE), the founder of the Advaita Vedānta (non-dualist) school of philosophy, holds that these questions are answered in the Upaniṣadic sentence, tat tvaṃ asi (‘you are that’).
The body, for Śaṃkara, is part of an illusory external world. This external world is superimposed on reality giving the false impression of identity and association (between the self and the body). Liberation for Śaṃkara, however, is realisation that your true self ultimately is Brahman (God) – this identity needs only to be realised in order for you to be liberated and for superimposition to be removed. However, Śaṃkara also holds that being liberated while embodied (jīvanmukti) is possible. This begs the question, how then can one be liberated while still embodied? Moreover, why might one remain embodied after liberation?
This paper seeks to answer some of these questions by analysing Śaṃkara’s non-dualistic worldview in conjunction with the possibility of being liberated while still embodied. While I argue that liberation while still living is necessary for Śaṃkara, I also argue that the possibility of being liberated while embodied is not ultimately compatible with a non-dualistic worldview. Jīvanmukti therefore, for Śaṃkara and the school of non-dualism, poses a fundamental problem.
Şima İmşir: Heredity vs. The Nation-State: The Case of the Turkish Republic
In 1930s, the newly founded Republic of Turkey was developing its ideology of modernity. The new ideology defined ideal Turkish citizens as modern, fashionable, high-cultured, sporty and healthy. To guarantee the welfare of the social body, the new government launched a war against contagious and venereal diseases. Protecting one’s own body was promoted as the first requirement of a good citizen by the medical establishment of the time. Citizens should not only be careful to remain healthy, but they should also avoid hiring people with diseases as maids, cooks, servants, or nannies. The clear definition of what/who constituted “untouchable” bodies was not only limited to occupational relations. In 1933, a Health Almanac was published under the editorship of a psychiatrist, Mazhar Osman. In the part of the book dealing with suggested behaviors, he states that citizens should not marry “degenerate” people who had “theft, murder, immorality and filthy diseases in their ancestry.” The untouchables were thus not only people with diseases, but also those with bad characters or ancestors with bad health or moral histories.
In this paper, I propose to analyze Mazhar Osman’s Health Almanac and discuss the politics behind the “untouchable bodies” in Turkish Republic of the 1930s.
In 1930s, the newly founded Republic of Turkey was developing its ideology of modernity. The new ideology defined ideal Turkish citizens as modern, fashionable, high-cultured, sporty and healthy. To guarantee the welfare of the social body, the new government launched a war against contagious and venereal diseases. Protecting one’s own body was promoted as the first requirement of a good citizen by the medical establishment of the time. Citizens should not only be careful to remain healthy, but they should also avoid hiring people with diseases as maids, cooks, servants, or nannies. The clear definition of what/who constituted “untouchable” bodies was not only limited to occupational relations. In 1933, a Health Almanac was published under the editorship of a psychiatrist, Mazhar Osman. In the part of the book dealing with suggested behaviors, he states that citizens should not marry “degenerate” people who had “theft, murder, immorality and filthy diseases in their ancestry.” The untouchables were thus not only people with diseases, but also those with bad characters or ancestors with bad health or moral histories.
In this paper, I propose to analyze Mazhar Osman’s Health Almanac and discuss the politics behind the “untouchable bodies” in Turkish Republic of the 1930s.