Performing Specimens: Contemporary Performance and Biomedical Display 9781350035676, 9781350035669, 9781350035690

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Staged Specimens in the Museum and Gallery
2 The Ethics of Specimenhood
3 Performing Resistant Specimens
4 Queering the Specimen
5 Self-Experimenting Specimens
6 Future Specimens
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Performing Specimens

Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues explores the interactions between science and performance, providing readers with a unique guide to current practices and research in this fast-expanding field. Through shared themes and case studies, the series offers rigorous vocabularies and methods for empirical studies of performance, with each volume involving collaboration between performance scholars, practitioners and scientists. The series encompasses the modalities of performance to include drama, dance and music. Series Editors John Lutterbie, Chair of the Department of Art and of Theatre Arts at Stony Brook University, USA Nicola Shaughnessy, Professor of Performance at the University of Kent, UK In the Same Series An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences ISBN 978-1-4742-5704-6 John Lutterbie Affective Performance and Cognitive Science edited by Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard ISBN 978-1-4081-8398-4 Performance and the Medical Body edited by Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard ISBN 978-1-4725-7078-9 Performing Psychologies Nicola Shaughnessy ISBN 978-1-4742-6085-5 Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia and Victor Jacono ISBN 978-1-4725-8478-6 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook ISBN 978-1-4725-9179-1 Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music edited by Pil Hansen with Bettina Bläsing ISBN 978-1-4742-8471-4

Performing Specimens Contemporary Performance and Biomedical Display Gianna Bouchard

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Gianna Bouchard, 2020 Gianna Bouchard has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. vii–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image © Sean Gallup/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3567-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3569-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-3568-3 Series: Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1 1 Staged Specimens in the Museum and Gallery 27 2 The Ethics of Specimenhood 49 3 Performing Resistant Specimens 71 4 Queering the Specimen 93 5 Self-Experimenting Specimens 117 6 Future Specimens 141 Notes 163 References 168 Index 176

LIST OF FIGURES

1 Woodcut illustration from Fasciculus Medicine, 1495. © Wellcome Collection, CC BY  6 2 Anatomical Venus, wax figure of reclining woman, by Clemente Susini, 1771–1800. A627043 Pt16. © Science Museum, London. Wellcome Collection. CC BY  32 3 An Anatomie in Four Quarters by Clod Ensemble. © Hugo Glendinning and Clod Ensemble, 2011. Reproduced with the permission of Clod Ensemble  81 4 The Body Is a Big Place (performance still), Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy, 2011, five-channel video projection, heart perfusion device and live performance, single-channel video on monitor, soundscape by Gail Priest. Photo: Geordie Cargill. Reproduced with the permission of the artists  90 5 Bloodlines by Chimera, performer Adam Kirkham, 2013. © Dr Anna Tanczos, Sci-Comm Studios. Reproduced with the permission of Anna Tanczos  160

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making and has benefitted from the support and input of many mentors, colleagues and friends along the way. My thanks go to those who inspired and encouraged me as my teachers and supervisors: Joe Kelleher, Alan Read, Adrian Kear, Graham White, Susan Painter, Stacey Prickett, Stephanie Jordan, Susanne Greenhalgh, Lib Taylor, Jonathan Bignell and Roger Cook, amongst others. There are those I met over the course of my studies and when taking my first steps in lecturing, who have continued to give their advice and their friendship over the years: Jen Harvie, Paul Johnson, Sophie Nield, Fiona Wilkie, Adrian Heathfield, Dominic Johnson, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Joshua Abrams and Lis Austin. I want to thank colleagues and friends at Anglia Ruskin University, past and present, especially: Sue Wilson, John Gardner, Catherine Silverstone, Heather Lilley, Kerstin Bueschges, Helen Odell-Miller, Helen Loth, Alison Ainley, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, Joss Hands, Sarah Barrow, Rebecca Warner, Eva AymamíReñé, Simone Spagnolo, Alejandro Postigo, Simon Bell and Nigel Ward. At the University of Birmingham, I have been very fortunate to find another group of supportive and inspiring colleagues: Caroline Radcliffe, Adam Ledger, Rose Whyman, Trish McTighe, Cristina Delgado-Garcia, Aneta Mancewicz, David Pattie, Graham Saunders, Ellen Redling, Paul Geary, Joanna Bucknall, Pablo Pakula, Jessica Parfitt, Catriona Fallow, Russell Jackson, Danny Warboys, Linda Muirhead, David Crisp, Undreia Capewell, Phil Speck, and Jayne Smith and Lizzie Compton, who keep the whole show on the road. Thanks also to Anna Harpin, Rachel Zerihan, Patrick Duggan, Royona Mitra, James Frieze, Mary Oliver, Dan Rebellato and Kara Reilly, whose work and comradeship I value enormously whenever our paths cross.

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Thanks to new friends I have met through TaPRA and particularly the Performance and Science Working Group; your thoughts on my work and our shared discussions have been so helpful. Thanks to Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Birmingham for funding study leave to work on this project and bring it to completion. Thank you to Nicola Shaughnessy and John Lutterbie, the series editors, and to Mark Dudgeon, Lara Bateman and the team at Methuen Drama who have been patient and efficient with every query and have encouraged me to reach the final full stop. I have also benefitted from the generosity of Suzy Willson and Paul Clarke of Clod Ensemble, whose work has become central to my own. I want to say particular thanks to those friends who are always there: to Sarah Gorman for her enduring friendship and humour; to Tory Young and Mark Currie, for shared meals and holidays; to Martin O’Brien, for work that has shifted my thinking; and to Alex Mermikides, who is my fellow traveller and companion along the medicine/performance interface. My very special thanks go to my family, who bear my strange fascinations and who know they will have to visit medical museums wherever they go! To my mum, Judith Bouchard, and my dad, the late Alan Bouchard, who never failed to back me; to my sister Kathryn Truswell, and her wonderful family, Alan, William and Ava Truswell; to Rick Burrows; to Gill Palin; to absent loved ones; and to all the Jacksons. And finally, to Paul Jackson, whose love, patience, generosity, optimism, wisdom and creativity mean everything.

Introduction

Since the early modern period, when learned men started to conceive of the body, and to examine and care for it, as worthy of objective study and evidence-based enquiry, the patient has been constructed as a medicalized subject and treated as a specimen. Subjected to the dominant authority of medicine in the realms of illness and disease, the patient-as-specimen became framed by a privileged medical establishment that was increasingly professionalized and predominantly male. Seeking to know and to cure the body of its ailments, medical practice focused on progressively more intensive and invasive ways of looking at the patient and revealing it to the medical gaze for the purposes of diagnosis and treatment. Moving from surface examinations to detailed internal dissections, the patient was rendered an object for analysis, involving close observation and medically managed regimes of care. Hence, the patient-as-specimen was, and still is, both the corpse on the anatomy slab and the sick body in the clinic or hospital; the dead and the living objectified in the same ways. In the interests of promoting medical knowledge, the specimen has long been singled out to become a particular case that could be followed and even disseminated to others through various forms of display. Alive or dead, the medical specimen has been spectacularized in ways that blur research and entertainment, from public acts of dissection in the sixteenth century to living medical lectures on bodies and conditions in the nineteenth century. The interface between medicine and modes of performance is revealed in these practices too, as specimen bodies have been and still are staged in public arenas and performed in ways that demonstrate and reinforce medical knowledge. Presented in particular medical ‘theatres’, such as the anatomy or hospital lecture theatre, audiences

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gather to witness the exposition of the body. Certain ‘actors’ have privileged access to the body and medical knowledge, which is then relayed to the spectators for educational, social and political reasons. The distinctions between medicine and performance can become entangled then in relation to the specimen, as it is displayed and looked at by spectators in different social and historical, but always mediated, medicalized, contexts. This book is predicated on this notion of the specimen as being medically framed and subject to certain performance dynamics, including those of display and spectatorship. Rather than being a historical concept, running in parallel with the birth of modern medicine, I propose that the medicalized specimen is now more ubiquitous than ever. Having remained a constant in Western medicine into the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century the construction of the specimen has shifted into the social, political and personal realm, as medical ideas and practices have infiltrated everyday lives. For example, any cursory glance through television listings pages over the last ten years would highlight the prevalence of medical reality and documentary programmes, including those examining so-called ‘embarrassing’ conditions, showing cosmetic modifications and surgical operations, evaluating dietary interventions, assessing health and fitness regimes, and those following the emergency medical services as they attend various call-outs. The plethora of medical television shows continue the traditions of presenting pathologized specimen bodies to a gathered audience through performative means. Programmes such as Embarrassing Bodies (2007 onwards) and Supersize vs. Superskinny (2008–14) display and spectacularize those who present themselves to the doctors, revealing their various ailments and disruptive bodies in order to be helped towards healing and change. These patients allow their bodies to be subjected to intrusive surveillance in order for the viewer to fully appreciate the desire in the patient to seek medical help. As viewers, we are shown the pathology so that our interest is piqued to follow the traditional medical narrative of investigation, diagnosis and cure. For both viewer and viewed, the narrative journey is often established as one moving from embarrassment, disease and even disgust with the offending body, towards restitution and therapy. Other programmes, such as the documentary series Bodyshock (2003 onwards), focus on a  single individual and investigate their condition, following

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them in their everyday lives. Selected for being ‘extraordinary’, these cases highlight one particular condition, such as gigantism, obesity or conjoined twins. Whilst the programmes are often focused on the lived realties of these subjects, the narrative that frames the footage is medical and an episode will often incorporate encounters with doctors and surgeons who set about treating the condition or will contextualize and explain it through a biological lens. The audience witnesses often rather mundane ailments and physiological anomalies being transformed, via these reality documentaries, into examples of discomforting and pathologized bodies. Some programmes seek to sensationalize certain conditions and subjects in a manner that is very evocative of the historical freak show, drawing on techniques of exaggeration and dramatization to incite voyeuristic forms of staring at bodies.1 At the same time, newspapers and magazines pick up on the latest fads in fitness and well-being, on new diets, and on ways of improving bodies and minds to get fit, maintain health and stave off illness. Medical breakthroughs and controversies are newsworthy subjects, and, in the UK, the state of national health care provision is under constant scrutiny. All in all, we seem to be hooked on watching, reading about, testing, enacting and discussing different forms of medical and healthcare, suggesting the dominance of medically inflected ways of framing and thinking about the self, about ways of living and relating to others. Contemporary understandings of the self are, therefore, significantly informed and shaped by the presentation and treatment of individuals as specimens; we are constantly exposed to medical approaches and practices that contextualize, analyse and treat us as pathologized subjects. Simultaneously, the pervasiveness of these ways of thinking means that individuals adopt and adapt the same attitudes towards themselves, rendering the self as a specimen to be objectified and assessed within medical regimes of self-care in order to get healthier and fitter. Technologies now enable and encourage the active monitoring of our biological selves, from blood pressure readings to sleep pattern analysis, meaning that our bio-status is increasingly personally available, to be checked and reviewed on a daily basis. I argue, therefore, that ‘specimenhood’, as a particular medicalized subjectivity, has shifted from the rarefied realm of medicine into our quotidian experience.2 Far from diagnosis and treatment only residing in clinical settings, individuals have increasing access to a

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range of tools that can test and analyse their own symptoms, whilst popular culture maintains its fascination with presenting certain people as specimens, displayed as exemplars to educate (medically and, often, morally), to influence and to amuse. We have become experienced and adept viewers of the performance of pathologized bodies in the public arena, and have also become used to monitoring the performance of our own bodies in terms of its fitness and overall condition. In other words, the performance of health and illness has become integral to contemporary, Western society through pervasive, ever-circulating representations, and a shift in self-understanding that is composed of an emerging awareness of our biological selves through objectification and self-care activities. Taking my cue from the creation and function of medical specimens in the anatomy theatre and the pathology laboratory, this book explores how the idea of the specimen can be conceptualized through a performance analysis lens to address how individuals and bodies are presented and conceived of in the contemporary moment. Always located within a medicalized context, the specimen offers a provocative nexus of lines of sight that are established through visual encounter and relationality, drawing in ethical and ontological questions. Examining medical specimens as constituted through modes of performance, and selected performances as containing and performing specimens, I consider the value of staging certain bodies in medicalized contexts and how they are presented. My analysis also examines the ways in which performance might offer points of resistance to forms of specimenhood that seek to objectify, pathologize and discipline the self.

Histories and definitions of specimens The concept of the specimen being used here emerges from science and, more specifically, from the history and practices of medicine. Medical practitioners have developed methods and concepts of working with patients that focus on their bodies as objects of interrogation and analysis, whether living or dead. As medical subjects, bodies are placed under the care of the physician and sequestered in specialist environments where they can be more closely monitored and evaluated, whether on a ward, in a consulting room or in a dissection

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lab. Separated from everyday life and under the authority of the medic, the specimen is made visible and interpretable as a biological entity capable of being investigated and cured (either in the present or at some point in the future, depending on the efficacy of medical progress). The exemplary medical specimen is the dissected corpse, offering as it does unparalleled access to the interior of the body in a spectacle of disaggregation. Laid out on a table and subject to a slow, methodical undoing, it has produced significant anatomical and physiological insights, and has become a central figure in medical training that continues today. The ritual of dissection, particularly in the early modern period, also highlights aspects of theatricality and performance as part of its process and can enliven the links being made here between specimens and performance. To this end, it is worth examining its historical foundation in order to further understand the dynamics of separation, display and spectatorship at work in the creation of specimens within medical environments that have been theatricalized. Dissection became an important medical, academic and civic undertaking in some European cities in the sixteenth century, particularly in Italy. It formed part of a physician’s training but was also a means of conveying social status and prestige on an institution and its medical faculty.3 Initially, the procedure only functioned as a means of re-asserting extant text-based knowledge located in the works of the ancient Greeks, which were studied and venerated as the repository of accurate anatomical insights. The opening of the cadaver before a gathered audience was a means of demonstrating and reinforcing that textual authority, usually from Galen, the most respected of Greek physicians (c. 130–c. 210 CE). The process was nonetheless laden with social and medical codes, and carried out in a performative mode involving display and pedagogical intent. Its organization can be discerned from images of the time, such as that contained in Joannes de Ketham’s book, Fasciculus Medicine, from 1495 (see Figure 1). In this woodcut, the corpse-as-specimen is at the forefront of the picture: a muscular male about to be dissected, lying prone on a wooden table, with a basket for cast-off parts beneath. Around him are gathered distinguished looking men in robes and hats, seemingly caught in focused conversations, with only two of them taking any direct notice of the action on and immediately around the table. This anatomy ‘theatre’ is a place of debate and discussion amongst select men.

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FIGURE 1  Woodcut illustration from Fasciculus Medicine, 1495.

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In the immediate vicinity of the corpse are two men who seem to  have a more proximal and intimate engagement with this specimen. One leans over the body, sleeves pushed up, holding the corpse’s head in his left hand, whilst in his right he holds a curved knife – the dissecting implement ready for action and about to make the first incision. This man, the surgeon or sector, is the only one who comes into direct contact with the corpse and in this position of physical contact is the lowest in the medical hierarchy. At this time, medicine was separated into the intellectual act of thinking and knowing about the body, and the practical, experiential work of undertaking any treatment or surgeries. In sixteenth-century Italy, for instance, medics favoured ‘leaving manual operation to the barbers’, who acted as surgeons, and the physici ‘instead of using their hands … engaged in speculation about nature’ (French 1999: 145). Manual work became increasingly connected to lower social status, leading to a growing separation between physician and surgeon, and evident in the woodcut representation. Surgery was viewed as an ‘applied science, which thus belonged … amongst the so-called “mechanical” arts’ (Pouchelle 1990: 19). In the image, the labourer is poised to begin the work of disaggregation whilst learned men merely watch and discuss the process. This endeavour is directed by the man to the right, standing behind the cadaver’s head. The ostensor had the task of guiding the sector in his work and demonstrating the revealed anatomy to the spectators. He holds a radius, or pointer, in order to mediate between text, spectator and body, and body and dissector. He often had to translate Latin for the surgeon, which was being read by the lector or professor, who occupies the space above the action, separated by his professorial chair and lectern. Charged with overseeing the procedure, he read sections of ancient, authoritative anatomical treatises to the onlookers, relevant to each stage of the dissection. The image thus captures the hierarchy of medical thinking and practice as an embodied and spatial arrangement, as much as a conceptual one. The specimen demonstrated in this theatre was meant to persuade spectators of the truth of the ancient books, as body parts were revealed in order to confirm the textual lesson being delivered by the lector. Pedagogically, it served as a means of working through doubt to understanding, by using the body as a prop. In the process, the cadaver became an early example of a medical specimen, extracted from normal post-mortem cultural

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practices and staged as a unique instance in the newly developing early modern anatomy theatre. The body as specimen, however, was not considered to be the repository of new learning, as we might expect, until the sixteenth century and the work of Andreas Vesalius (1514–64). Vesalius was appointed as professor of surgery and anatomy in 1537 at the University of Padua’s medical school. Renowned for his work as a dissector, he engaged those skills and knowledge in the production of his ‘atlas’ of the human body, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543). This became the accepted standard work on anatomy  for several centuries and marked a significant shift in conceptions of dissection as a practice. The book’s contents were structured around his carefully orchestrated dissections and the book integrates detailed anatomical illustrations with an explanatory narrative on the procedures employed at each stage of the process, alongside comprehensive notes and descriptions of the revealed physiology. The frontispiece of the book captures Vesalius mid-dissection, operating on a pregnant woman to a substantial and rowdy crowd, tightly packed into a makeshift anatomy theatre. Vesalius performs for his audience, both readers of the atlas and viewers in the space, demonstrating the female anatomy as he peels away the layers of flesh and tissue to access her womb. He gestures towards her interior, inviting the gaze to linger on the woman’s opened body. In Vesalius’ anatomy theatre, the cadaver-as-specimen was no longer a prop to textual knowledge but was legitimated as producing its own truths. This marked a meaningful change in medical thinking and practice, with Vesalius initiating a ‘stress on direct, visual, sensory experience’ in dissection that involved ‘the cultivation of “autopsia” – literally, seeing for oneself’ (Sawday 1997: 35). This was only feasible through a conflation of all the professional roles in the early anatomy theatre – lector, ostensor and sector – into one accomplished performance of dissective skill and didacticism, a move which heralded the birth of modern anatomical practice. The specimen was now able to offer its own truth that could be shared with others in the dissection space or through representations, such as Vesalius’ atlas, which could be disseminated and studied beyond the anatomy theatre. Throughout these medical developments, the corpse for dissection had a very specific social, medical and ontological status. As dissection became a highly organized and regulated procedure

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in  European centres of medicine in the early modern period, it required academic, civic and religious authorities to work cooperatively. The precise details for each dissection were explicitly coded as official rules because, as a deeply controversial practice, it was crucial that sanctioned anatomies did not escape the boundaries of social or religious acceptability. Local statutes, for instance, determined the exact number of bodies to be annually bequeathed to a university for this purpose, invariably severely limiting them. For example, Paduan statutes in Italy authorized the provision of two cadavers per annum, one female and one male (Carlino 1999: 95). The specimens-in-waiting were not randomly selected, but their identification was closely tied to judicial proceedings. Dissection was popularly viewed as dire punishment that continued into the afterlife, as a form of eternal retribution.4 The dissected body was believed to be denied the possibility of being resurrected at the Final Judgment, according to Christian beliefs, which required the corpse to remain intact in order to be resurrected whole. This meant that the dissected specimen was always that of the condemned criminal, whose offence and social status made hanging, followed by anatomization, an appropriate penalty. For the anatomist, hanging was the preferred method of execution, as it left the body whole and relatively undamaged; this inevitably meant that offenders from the lower classes and the socially marginalized were selected for dissection, as hanging was the judicially preferred sentence for them (Carlino 1999: 94). Thus, transgressive bodies became the cadavers for dissection, used to underpin authoritative and respected medical knowledge. Although considered in life to be deplorable and unworthy of living, in death the executed criminal body exemplified the role of the specimen, considered ‘as typical of certain qualities or of the human species’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). As a medical specimen undergoing anatomization, the felonious individual became representative of all bodies, regardless of rank or morals, and adopted as a universal, standardized example. The criminal body was made legitimate in and through its appearance and dissolution in the anatomy theatre. This tradition of transit for the criminalized, from villainous to exemplar, continues into the contemporary moment. For instance, when a corpse was required for dissection as part of the Visible Human Project, set up in America in 1994, the project acquired the body of a convicted murderer in

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Texas. Joseph Paul Jernigan consented to being anatomized after his execution in order to establish a virtual database of images of his microscopically sliced body for medical research.5 Another important source of specimen bodies has been the poor and the unclaimed; those, in other words, who have been rejected and whom no one regarded as much more than disposable individuals, at least until the nineteenth century. At times of shortages of corpses for dissection, the situation worsened considerably and contributed to the rise of the ‘resurrectionists’ in the nineteenth century. These men robbed graves for fresh corpses to sell to desperate medical men and the shortage also inspired murderous acts, to provide specimens for science.6 Such transgressive, undesirable bodies have thus long been utilized by medical establishments and transformed into unique specimens in the moment of their anatomization. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a specimen serves ‘as an example of the thing in question for the purposes of investigation or scientific study’, meaning that these dead specimen bodies stand in as proxies for other bodies in medical contexts. The single body dissected by medical students during their training in the UK, for instance, must operate as a material and epistemological example of all the other bodies they will encounter when they become practitioners, regardless of the age, gender and ethnicity of the corpse. The specimen body can therefore be thought of as both one-of-a-kind and identical with multiple others. As a practice mediated through various forms of representation, from illustrations to models to microscopic slices, dissection confounds certain traditional boundaries between art and science, with the specimen at the centre. In his essay on technology, psychologist Robert Romanyshyn explicitly reads the anatomizing of the corpse as a mode of theatre practice that traverses aesthetic and epistemological divides between the two disciplines, as placed within the context of theatre, the corpse appears not only as a spectacle but as a dramatic event, as a work of art. In this regard, the corpse is very much a work of invention. The body anatomised as corpse upon the stage of the dissecting table is as much a piece of created fiction as it is discovered fact. The body observed on the stage of the dissecting table belongs as much to the realm of art as it does to science. (1989: 119)

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In the seemingly simple act of placing the cadaver in the centre of the anatomy theatre, the dead body becomes a spectacular, dramatic specimen. In staging this opening of the body, to be observed as it is dismembered, its spectacle disrupts normative boundaries between reality and representation, fact and fiction, science and art. As an isolated and fragmented specimen within a specific kind of theatre, the cadaver-as-specimen is established as an inherently subversive entity that falls between established categories in its liminality, transgression and theatricality. In providing this brief overview of the development of dissective practice in the early modern period and the significance of the specimen, it suggests an interesting interface between medicine and performance that has the cadaver at its centre. This revelatory and spectacular mode of investigation is intimately connected with the dynamics and practices of performance, where the specimen is displayed, where anatomists demonstrate their knowledge and where a spectator can be enlightened and even entertained by the visceral explorations and slow dissolution of the specimen body. In the anatomy theatre, the specimen is considered to be typical of its class or type – it stands in for all other human bodies – and yet it is a unique and individual instance. The anatomical specimen is also a transgressive entity, blurring categories and conferred with a special status, often above an individual’s original station in life. The position of the specimen as a troubled and troubling body (part) emerges as a significant factor in its selection and conceptualization – an intriguing blend of the excluded, abandoned and the ideal. The body, selected as a specimen for medical interrogation, is often pathologized and performed, and I contend that this is a fundamental part of specimens and the construction of specimenhood, whilst the body-as-specimen also offers the potential to subvert, queer and otherwise undermine these dynamics through art and performance. Such instances open various concerns and issues, such as what kind of politics might be derived from going against the grain, from re-making and re-thinking the specimen as valuable in itself, recuperating it from medicine? Can the specimen reflect back on the authority and ubiquity of medicine, to reveal its workings and its blind spots? How might the performance of specimens provoke us to think about bodies and selves otherwise from those determined by medical science?

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Having outlined the anatomizing context of specimens, I want to consider the more usual medical specimen, that of the body part that has been detached, prepared and stored for display, as can be found in any number of anatomy museums. The specimens that have informed my thinking, therefore, partly reside in such collections and museums, stored in jars, mounted, sliced, pinned and displayed in a multitude of ways and forms that best reveal their fleshy matter. Usually evidencing pathologies, some of these specimens are captured behind glass, floating in preservatives, separated from their origins and bodies, detached but not discarded. They may also be bones, cleaned for re-articulation without the flesh, or slivers of cross-sectioned organs on microscope slides. These are organic, wet and dry specimens – the remains of living bodies, both human and animal. In medical museums, such collections are often enhanced by models and replicas of anatomies in wax, wood, plastic and resin, manmade copies that are more durable and user-friendly. Finally, the gaps between the specimens and other bodies, alive or dead, are filled with texts and images that contextualize them and illuminate their purpose.

SPECIMEN CASE STUDY 1: ‘THE LEFT HAND OF A CHILD’

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he small hand could be in motion, as though someone is trying to remove something from the bottom of the jar, and they have plunged their hand into the glass container that is full of clear liquid. The hand doesn’t quite touch the base, fishing in the water to retrieve the missing entity, the fingers curled softly upwards towards the palm, ready to close. The fingers are chalky white and wrinkled, going darker in colour towards the tips, around the nails. The nails themselves are deeply unsettling in their very dark brown colour that indicates something is awry. They are not flush with life but remind one of something very ancient. They curl towards the fleshy pads of the palm, which are puffy and red, an alarming and lively contrast with the dead nails. They seem too dense in their fleshiness, as though rouged for effect to highlight their contours and depth. Another contrast

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then strikes the viewer, as the hand joins the wrist in an awkward position of flex. The skin of the wrist is a creamy white that does not look human, the skin folds seeming more akin to material or plastic. On closing, the hand could withdraw from the jar, except that it is attached there, hanging from a wire from the sealed lid. There is no escape from this liquid suspension, severed from life and cut off from any/every body. The cut itself is hidden and made attractive beneath a lace napkin that caps the forearm, like a bonnet, tied in place with string. It’s a cap and sleeve that prettifies at the same time as making it all the more grotesque and brutal. The lace floats out from the arm, its delicate finery obscuring the marks and wound of dissection and amputation.

This specimen is that of the ‘left hand of a child about two years old’ from the collection of anatomical specimens created by Frederik Ruysch in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century and now on display in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Its accompanying description notes the specimen as having ‘skin of dove-colour, more rich on a palm [sic]. The section is bandaged by a lacy napkin’.7 Ruysch was a renowned doctor in Amsterdam, specializing in obstetrics, surgery and the study of anatomy through dissection at the turn of the eighteenth century. He was appointed Praelector Chirurgiae et Anatomie of Amsterdam in 1667, retaining the post until his death in 1731. Ruysch used the opportunity as City Anatomist to pursue his interest in developing preservation techniques so that anatomy could be studied long after the act of dissection. He practised injecting blood vessels with ‘elixir of vitriol’, a secret preservation recipe, and conserved specimens in alcohol solutions. This allowed him to establish a substantial collection that was later transferred to the wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, belonging to Peter the Great, who purchased it in 1713, and some of which can still be seen in the Russian museum today. Ruysch and other anatomists had an understandable desire to preserve the body beyond the very brief window of opportunity immediately after death (lasting no more than two or three

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days). With no means to store a body long-term, the need for a more lasting look at the anatomized specimen, uninterrupted by decay, contributed to the newfound experimentation during the early modern period with preservation techniques for organs and physiological structures. The impetus to salvage the dead body and its parts beyond dissection, to render it into potentially multiple specimens that had futurity and utility, required the anatomist or preserver to ‘freeze time’ in order to create a ‘permanent reference point’ that could be returned to repeatedly (Alberti 2011: 6). In the process, the ‘ephemeral’ body became ‘durable’, as borne out by the extensive collections of specimens held and maintained by medical museums on an international scale (Alberti 2011: 6). The conservancy of these organic specimens acts as a substitute for the living body that cannot be fragmented and retained in the same way. This process of replacement has its correlate in performance, according to performance scholar Peggy Phelan, where there might be an attempt to stage reality, but performance can only duplicate some reality effects because of its representational status (Phelan 1993: 126). In this sense, performance ‘relies on repetition and mimesis to produce substitutes for the real’ (Phelan 1993: 126). In terms of the specimen, the parts of the dead body stand in for the living one but the procedure changes the body, fixing it in unnatural ways and altering its biology. As a specimen, the body ‘becomes something other than [itself]’ (Phelan 1993: 146). For Phelan, this same process is activated when performance is documented, thereby changing the ephemeral live event into a different form to enable capture and storage. With substitution operating as an ontological aspect of both specimens and performance, it is part of this book’s analytical work to uncover its political implications. The sense of specimen durability is evident in the description of the child’s dissected arm above, as it has been preserved in this state for approximately two hundred years. What is more dubious is how fixed or frozen it has been over this time, as specimens can continue to decay and deteriorate. As already noted, the specimen can be ‘a part or portion of something that can serve as an example of the thing in question’ and so we can assume that Ruysch wanted to conserve this hand of a child as just such an exemplar (Oxford English Dictionary online). As it has no visible or indicated pathology, he seems to have selected this as being representative of all or any children’s hands and so worth removing, preserving and storing for the future. In

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this process of removal, the creation of the specimen inevitably necessitates some kind of intervention in the body, entailing a radical separation and violence. The hand of the child had to be removed from the rest of the body, even though this trauma is disguised and obscured by the placing of the lace napkin over the site/sight of the wound. This ‘fragmentation’ of the body is both a ‘physical and conceptual act’, as medical museum curator Sam Alberti notes, and I will argue that it is a key feature of specimenhood (2011: 6). Alberti goes on to describe this process of dissective fragmentation as ‘a manual craft and a creative process’, removing the impact on the specimen body from his analysis. This portrayal neatly avoids the implicit brutality of the act and only attends to the work of the surgeon or anatomist who carries out the dissection – it is they who perform the manual work and they who are, allegedly, creative in their practice (2011: 7). For the subject, who is about to be turned into a specimen, whether living or dead, partially or as a whole body, this process can be destructive and even catastrophic, if the whole body is anatomized. In the violence of the act of specimen creation, there arises a tension, therefore, between the authorized dissector, who has the legitimacy and training to divide the body, and the subject of that action. This is explicit in relation to Ruysch’s hand specimen; we only know its provenance through its collectors, the men of science, and nothing about the child, except that it was ‘about two years old’. We do not know the name, sex, originary location of the child or even if they had died prior to the amputation. Alberti puts it as follows: ‘The authority of the medical practitioner was clearly demonstrated by the extent to which the specimen became the property of the collector or the hospital … Power relations were as evident in this form of collecting human remains as they were in the colonial encounter during which Europeans appropriated countless indigenous human remains’ (2011: 101). He goes on to reflect on the fact that hierarchies of social class were as manifest here as those of race, with ‘the bodies of the poor – stolen or unclaimed’ ending up on the dissection slab, as already noted (2011: 101).

Specimen politics and ethics As a study interested in the display and performance of specimenhood, this book considers the political implications of the

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appearance of specimens in a range of medicalized contexts, from the anatomy exhibition to the biology lab. Much of the analysis is underpinned by the work of philosopher Michel Foucault who argued that an epistemic shift in the construction, understanding and circulation of medical knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century, and centred around the clinic or teaching hospital, changed the way that a patient and their body were viewed. The ‘medical gaze’ became the domain of ‘a doctor supported and justified by an institution, that of a doctor endowed with the power of decision and intervention’ (Foucault 1973: 89). He believed that this power emerged from two different developmental loci, the first of which engaged with the idea of ‘the body as machine’ and which was based on ‘an anatomo-politics of the human body’ (Foucault in Campbell and Sitze 2013: 44). This power has focused on ‘disciplining’ the body of the individual in order to ensure its optimum productivity and efficiency, whilst remaining compliant (Campbell and Sitze 2013: 44). The body of the worker needs to be healthy and obedient in order to be fully useful, and, therefore, the individual’s fitness is of concern to capitalism. The second locus developed from a concentration on ‘the species body’, which serves as ‘the basis of biological processes’ and takes into account population oversight and control through such things as ‘births and mortality … life expectancy and longevity’. Foucault named this aspect ‘the biopolitics of the population’, which, coupled with the anatomo-politics of the body, established ‘power over life’ through biological management, such as public health initiatives, and various forms of subjectification (Campbell and Sitze 2013: 44). Biopower, therefore, works at the level of the individual and at the level of the population, and is operative within power structures such as the nation state. If, as Foucault argued, medicine is a ‘political interventiontechnique with specific power effects’, the specimen is fully implicated in its reach and, in many ways, seems to mirror the developmental axes articulated above (Campbell and Sitze 2013: 72). The specimen is an individual example, taken from a particular body, in a way that resonates with an understanding of the ‘body as machine’. This body can be dismantled and deconstructed into its constituent parts through the process of dissective fragmentation, in order to further comprehend, research and treat its dysfunctions. Working within

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Foucault’s idea of anatomo-politics, the specimen assists in the ongoing medical desire to heal and, more importantly, to normalize bodies so that they can continue to be productive and useful. As a ‘single thing selected or regarded as typical of its class’, it is also, of course, part of the mechanism of biopolitics, used to measure and control populations (Oxford English Dictionary online). The specimen captures and reflects ideal or standard forms that can be read across all bodies or, if it is a pathological specimen, it captures the ‘unpredictable diversity of the diseased body’ (Alberti 2011: 6). Thus, as part of the body and representative of sections of populations, the specimen is the object of and subject to ‘both disciplinary effects and regulatory effects’ (Foucault in Campbell and Sitze 2013: 72). It is subject to and a result of such power effects; arguably, in its very existence, the specimen demonstrates these disciplinary processes.

SPECIMEN CASE STUDY 2: DISSECTION OF A FOOT

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he scene opens with filmic shots of medical technology and paraphernalia to situate us: the camera glances over a series of x-rays, some museum specimen jars containing amputated feet and hands, chairs with surgical scrubs thrown over their back rests, medical models and microscopes, skeletal structures and medical instruments laid out on a surgical tray. The next shots are video footage of human feet running in trainers, hands shuffling a pack of cards, and gymnastic tumbles, all distinctly outside of the pseudo dissection laboratory that we have just witnessed – the living anatomical comparators, alive and functioning in the world. We are then introduced to the narrator, a biologist, who states that ‘if we want to truly understand our hands and feet, we need to look inside them’ (Dissected 2014). In no more than thirty seconds of television, we have been introduced to some of the key components of the performance of specimens: context, architectures, relations, technologies, authorities, histories and its focus on revelation.

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Part of a two-part series broadcast in early 2014 by the BBC and titled Dissected,8 this brief opening set the scene for each onehour documentary, one dissecting the human hand and the other the human foot. Each episode claimed to take the viewer ‘inside two of the most amazing structures in the natural world: our hands and feet’ (Dissected 2014). With appropriate amounts of gravitas and apprehension at the somewhat macabre business of anatomization ahead, the narrator and biologist George McGavin introduced the dissection and its location – the Anatomy Museum of the University of Glasgow – and, more importantly, the medical men undertaking the task – a senior anatomist, Quentin Fogg, and, in the case of the anatomization of the foot, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, Kartik Hariharan. In this triumvirate of learned men, there are definite echoes back to the woodcut illustration from Fasciculus Medicine, with Fogg occupying the position of the sector, the one who prepares and cuts the body. Hariharan then speaks over the specimen, as the equivalent of the lector, with specialized, deep medical knowledge that enables him to apply anatomical insights to living comparators. Finally, McGavin takes the place of the ostensor, drawing the spectator’s attention to particularly interesting findings, asking for points of clarification and reinforcing the overall message of education through dissection. He mediates between the technicalities and details of medical practice and the television audience, translating the event into accessible and engaging insights. Authorized to cut into the cadaver’s foot and then speak about the findings, these men are allowed access to the specimen and it is through their knowledge and work that we, the audience, learn about particular anatomical features. In combining a special live recording of the dissection process with supplementary footage of living feet in action and being studied by various other scientists, we are led to an understanding of these structures, as proposed in the introductory sequence; by looking inside the body, at usually hidden and forbidden parts, we will be enlightened by science about our own physiology and somewhat awed by its complexities and capabilities. In this way, the dissection is performed and dramatized, intercut with scientific footage from outside of the lab but directly related to the revelations. This merged sense of didacticism and reverence has long been a part of anatomical practice and reaffirms its significance and utility in the face of its inescapable brutality and horror. To

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understand complex human anatomical structures, we need to ‘see inside them’, according to the programme, and this necessitates the violent opening of the dead body that will display the evidence. The specimen is a result of and enduringly subjected to this looking that Foucault described as the ‘medical gaze’ that became ‘ever more attentive, more insistent, more penetrating’ from the turn of the eighteenth century onwards (Foucault 1973: 15). Derived from the Latin word, specere, meaning ‘to look’ or ‘to look at’, the specimen is radically separated from its origins in order to be more fully observed, analysed and constructed as an exemplar (Oxford English Dictionary online). From the whole-body specimens on the anatomy theatre slab, the waste of the disaggregated parts and the remains are re-purposed into meaningful fragments that circulate in new specular economies and discursive structures. Both specimen case studies highlighted here, of the child’s hand and this dissected foot, can be identified, following Foucault, as the result of the violent regulatory effects of biopolitical practices that started to emerge in the early modern period. With the body considered dividable and subject to medico-scientific authority, the adult and child become part of this clinical, objectifying, classificatory and systematic knowledge development, along with the non-human. All bodies became and continue to be grist for the mill of biopower, observed, analysed and fragmented, when necessary. Looking at the small hand in the jar, with its capped and lacy amputation site, and watching medical men intently cutting and studying body parts, one is abruptly confronted with a relation of power that foregrounds and celebrates the anatomist and collector, whilst forgetting the name of the child and erasing that of the foot donor. The footage of the dissection is prefaced by reminding the viewer of the power of understanding that will result from witnessing it – an obvious boon to science and to the layperson watching – but it also highlights the authority of those permitted to make and explain the cut(s), surrounded as they are by their specialist technologies. The demonstration of medical prestige and power is theatricalized through props and the display of and access to the cadaver as specimen, a dynamic sustained since the early modern period. But these humble and fragile remains surely signal the need for sensitivity and care through ethical approaches to their handling and presentation. The dominance of medicine in these cases is being

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challenged by curators, ethicists, scholars, historians and artists, who seek to privilege the patient/donor along with their stories and experiences within medical realms. This has led to a growing interest in and concern with addressing proper ethical relations to body parts and human remains, specifically in museums. Underpinned by anxieties about possible exploitation, coercion and lack of consent, interested communities and the wider public are starting to ask how specimens should be viewed and by whom. What does an ethical treatment of specimens in medical museums now require and should they even remain on display? This turn to ethical considerations is addressed in the BBC documentaries in relation to the origins of the hand and the foot. The audience are shown multiple glimpses of wet specimens, suspended in pots, some labelled according to their physiology. The ethical implications of viewing these parts and the dissection of the hand are carefully contained and circumscribed by the gravitas of the presentation, implying a seriousness to the work that is dignified and proper, carried out by authorized and qualified physicians. But the viewer is also told certain things that should satisfy any concerns about the ethics of the film and the act within it. Informed that the arm has been prepared ‘following strict medical and ethical protocols that govern the dissection of human tissue’, the audience is reassured that there are codes in place to ensure ethical treatment of the dead body and that they have been adhered to. The pathologist also notifies us that the limb comes from a person who has donated their body to ‘medical education and research’, so that informed consent is implied, although whether this included the detail of being part of a mainstream television documentary is a moot point. What is left unspoken in the footage is any attempt to engage with the ethics of showing all the other specimens displayed around the act of dissection. Likely to have been collected and preserved before principles of consent and dignity in the body were fully articulated and enacted, they appear in the documentaries as set-dressing, readily available for spectatorship and lending the environment a suitably scientific and laboratory-style ambience. Ultimately, we are left with the strong impression that dissection is the only way to really comprehend the body and so, ethics aside, we and they really have no choice but to cut and to look. This book aims to explore the ontological and epistemological implications of this process of corporeal separation and display, through considering the specimen as a physical entity and a conceptual

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tool. In thinking about the concepts and dynamics at stake in the process of making, displaying and looking at specimens, I want to examine a growing collection of practices that create specimens in the contemporary moment. Specimens appear in popular culture, in different media, in artworks and in performance, situated within medical contexts or linked to certain medical cultures and practices. Through an examination of selected performance works that turn the performer’s body or another’s body into a specimen, the book will map out the relations between these performative acts and medical practices of collecting, storing and showing specimens in a variety of modes and contexts. Deliberately staged and even performed by others or themselves, specimens offer important insights into how the self, as body and matter, is constructed and perceived in the present moment. Biomedicine is a persistent and pervasive force in the first decades of the twenty-first century in global terms, with the life sciences, genetics and molecular biology all having a substantial impact on notions of selfhood, agency, health and society. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interface between performance and medicine, with the specimen at the centre, is vital in an increasingly medicalized social, political and cultural sphere. As our bodies are increasingly measured, tested and diagnosed, fragmented and objectified, specimenhood becomes a central feature of postmodern subjectivity, revealing the dominance of the ‘bio’ across every aspect of life and culture. In addressing the medicalized body on display and in performance, this book will consider the ethics of such display and the ethics of spectatorship in relation to the specimen body. By suggesting that the current manner of display and staging of certain bodies is analogous to the creation and display of medical specimens, this book provides a new conceptual framework for performance studies.

Structure of the book In investigating the specimen as an object of display and as a prop to medical discourse, following on from the early modern anatomy theatres outlined in this introduction, the first chapter considers specimenhood within the context of the museum and the art gallery. Moving from wax models in eighteenth century Italy displayed in

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the Museo di Storia Naturale la Specola in Florence, Italy, to the contemporary anatomical exhibition, Body Worlds, the arguments established in this chapter consider the specimen as authenticating scientific knowledge through its display as an object of study. These examples of wax models and real bodies presented as staged exhibits illuminate the use of theatricality in such displays and the resultant effect such modes have on the experience of viewing them, including the production of anxiety and ethical uncertainty. Chapter 2 sets theatre and performance aside to focus on the ethics and politics of specimens and specimenhood. Medical, scientific, artistic, social and legal affairs have all played a significant part in raising profound and complex questions relating to issues of consent and ownership of the body. Seemingly innate rights to physical integrity, to agency over one’s body, to respect for and the autonomy of both the living and the dead body, and the ‘property’ of one’s body have come under serious stress at the turn of the twenty-first century. Given the social, cultural, ontological and epistemological tensions involved, the chapter outlines debates around the key issues of specimenhood that involve consent and ownership, before moving into a detailed examination of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and the neoliberal subject. This aims to contextualize the contemporary subject as constructed by biopolitical forces that involve the performance of specimenhood. Given the crucial issues of property relations in the body and biopolitical subjectivity raised in the Chapter 2, the question arises as to what it means to stage the live body as a specimen in performance. Chapter 3 establishes the key dynamics of surveillance, erasure and detachment in the creation of specimens and explores these in relation to three performance examples. The artists’ staging strategies and the possibilities offered for an ethical and resistant, rather than a dehumanizing and objectifying, looking are interrogated.  Clod Ensemble’s An Anatomie in Four Quarters (2011) offers an opportunity to think about anatomy and the theatre as particular kinds of ‘vision machines’ (Kuppers 2004: 133). By collapsing distances between performers and audience, and through performing the venue of Sadler’s Wells as a kind of anatomized body, the piece invites the audience to experience specimenhood from different vantage points. Mat Fraser’s work as a live artist and disability activist in Cabinet of Curiosities (2014) remembers the devices and contexts of freak shows and the oppression of specimenhood in order

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to confront audiences with their own stereotypes and assumptions about disability within the medical museum and its collections. In terms of visual art practice, the work of Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy represents body parts within gallery contexts and through biosculptures in order to consider ethical debates around such issues as organ donation and xenotransplantation. In The Body Is a Big Place (2011), two pigs’ hearts fresh from the waste of a local abattoir are recycled, and connected to a heart perfusion machine, which forced them to beat again, as though alive. Through reanimating discarded body parts, this chapter argues that these biological remains and organic waste are recycled to resist unthinking abandonment of fragments of ourselves and other bodies and invites us to look at these revived specimens in a newly ethical and humane way. Following the idea of the resistant specimen, Chapter 4 explores practices that revel in the position of the performed specimen as a site of queer subversion and a revised ethical space, where artists and activists reclaim agency over medicalized versions and understandings of their bodies in relation to identity politics. Peggy Shaw (in collaboration with Clod Ensemble) staged herself as a specimen in MUST – The Inside Story (2008) in order to playfully subvert the medical gaze and draw attention to those aspects of her that get overlooked by doctors, that cannot be measured or objectified and that constitute a deep sense of embodied experience and a life lived. The spectacle of the ill body, displayed in popular culture and framed by medico-science as the hegemonic means of containing, controlling and healing it, is utilized by Martin O’Brien in his performances as a resistant form to those dominant discourses. In staging his personal, embodied specimenhood, away from the clinic and the hospital, and as a zombie, he attempted to reclaim agency over his body and illness. Preciado’s project Testo Junkie (2008) involved self-medicating with testosterone, writing about the performative act in the book of the same name. Undertaking a queer specimenhood, they work outside of mainstream medical understandings, particularly of gender identification, and seek to problematize, what they describe as, the current ‘pharmacopornographic era’. From the reclaiming of agency, Chapter 5 moves to the figure of the self-experimenter. At once celebrated as an essential part of medical development and repudiated for fear of controversy and backlash, the self-experimenter converts their own body into a

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specimen for experimentation and testing. Ethically controversial, the self-experimenter still lurks at the fringes of medical research and has also found an interesting niche in the wider cultural landscape in the likes of medical journalist Dr Michael Mosley. Some contemporary performance and visual artists have adopted this practice of self-experimentation in relation to emergent biotechnologies. This chapter focuses on ORLAN and Kira O’Reilly, who have both experimented with utilizing their own cells in tissue culturing projects. Engaging in biomedical techniques of in vitro tissue engineering, their work points towards the invisible and often unrecognized female labour involved in creating specimens for current stem cell research and reproductive technologies. As self-experimenters, these female artists recuperate the masculine idea of the heroic, self-sacrificing male experimenter, as well as signalling the place and use of the female body in certain bioeconomies. ORLAN’s Harlequin Coat was first exhibited in 2007 and draws attention to the global trade in human and nonhuman tissue and how such tissues are categorized, advertised and sold, as well as considering the notion of ‘waste’ in relation to certain biological materials. During a short sci-art residency in 2003–4, O’Reilly was trained in tissue culturing techniques and she became acutely aware of the presence of the non-human in this work, the pig that was slaughtered for research purposes, and so created her piece inthewrongplaceness (2005), as a response to these ethical and personal dilemmas. These self-experimenting artists are utilized here to draw attention to contemporary issues around the commodification and exchange of body parts in a global economy of circulating biological specimens, both human and non-human, and particularly in relation to the female body. The final chapter examines the future of specimenhood through a focus on relatively new biotechnologies and their potential impact on understandings of the self and identity. Thinking through recent theatre that stages biospecimens allows a final exploration of ideas around subjectivity, the ethics of display and the creation of new kinds of specimens through current biomedical practice. Certain medical conditions and, in some cases, their treatments pose epistemological and philosophical dilemmas in relation to normative understandings of what it means to be human and a singular individual. Through exploring the representation of medical chimerism – the phenomenon of two genetically distinct

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organisms coexisting in the same body – in two recent performance works, this section considers biotechnology’s potential to undermine the idea of the human specimen as exemplar and singularity. Both performances are based on real-life events and stage chimeric specimens through combinations of physical theatre, text and technologies. The work of Alex and Milton Mermikides (UK), Bloodlines (2013–ongoing), stages ‘John’, a young man who has been diagnosed with a deadly form of leukaemia (based on Milton’s own experience of the illness). The performance tracks his illness and recovery through a combination of dance, performance lecture and a soundscape created through the sonification of Milton’s blood count data, gathered as he experienced this life-threatening illness. The second chimeric specimen comes from Stein Holum Projects’ play Chimera, which was staged at the Gate Theatre in 2014. This imagines a mother discovering that she has medical chimerism and that her son is, in fact, her nephew, as a result of this rare condition. Based on recent court cases in America, the play explores questions of kinship and destabilizes the myth of DNA as providing unambiguous access to and confirmation of the individualized and originary self. These specimens in performance point towards the instability of certain biomedical categories and concepts, as they explore DNA and the biologization of the self. They confront fundamental questions about the embodied self as a discrete genetic entity and reimagine the future of the human specimen.

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1 Staged Specimens in the Museum and Gallery

The idea of ‘specimenhood’ being deployed in this book was coined by visual and cultural studies scholars Maria Gladstone and Janet C. Berlo in an essay exploring museum ethics in relation to bodily displays (2011). They reflect on the ‘normative’ presence  of bodies and body parts in national museums, particularly those of indigenous peoples, collected as specimens during centuries of colonial expansion and oppression. In identifying a renewed contemporary interest in these remains, they suggest that ‘anxiety about “specimenhood”’ underpins this attention, as people are increasingly concerned with the shift from subject to object in such contexts (Gladstone and Berlo 2011: 353). They link this apparent disquiet to a growing awareness of biotechnologies, such as cloning,  gene therapy and other means of intervening in life processes, believing museum visitors to be more receptive, therefore, to these other bodies and their appearance within institutional contexts. Arguing that ‘the notion of specimenhood … is an essential consideration of conceptualizing an ethics of the body on display’, they suggest that, once stored and displayed, these museological specimens have a renewed ethical force for the spectator (Gladstone and Berlo 2011: 354). For Gladstone and Berlo, specimenhood can engender ‘anxiety’ and ‘uneasiness’ in the viewer, as they are made to confront the various boundaries and transgressions that can turn a subject into an object (Gladstone and Berlo 2011: 353). This chapter develops these ideas about spectatorial relations to the specimen by examining how certain forms of medical anatomical knowledge are theatricalized and the resultant effect on the viewer.

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As bodies become objects of display, they are transformed through a process of becoming representational forms and the complexities of this shift are the subject of this analysis. Phelan claims that ‘[r]epresentation … always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing’, opening dynamic fissures and ruptures between the viewer and viewed when a specimen, real or constructed, is exhibited (1993: 2). Taking two examples, one historic and one contemporary, one of medical models and one of real bodies on show, I will consider why certain theatrical strategies of display are adopted in medical contexts, to what ends and how such modes of presentation engender spectatorial anxiety and ethical queasiness about spectacles of specimenhood. As anatomization divided the body, so specimens were created from the fragmented parts as a valued outcome of this process. The remains were transformed into different kinds of specimens as they were studied and preserved through various means. Each organ, structure, system and connective tissue was examined to gather knowledge about the whole body, and this forensic partitioning can be identified as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century in the anatomical illustrations of Leonardo da Vinci. Working alongside an anatomy professor from Pavia in Italy, Marcontonio della Torre, da Vinci documents spending gruesome nights in the company of cadavers in order to understand what lies beneath the flesh, rendering the body as an exquisite visual specimen in his notebooks (Clayton 1996: 121). Without the means to preserve bodies beyond responding to natural imperatives, such as restricting dissection to the winter months and carrying it out at night to avoid the sun (and prying eyes), organic specimens had to be translated initially into representational forms to conserve them. Captured in sculpture, woodcuts, engravings, drawings and small figurines, for example, the ruptured body was saved and encoded as durable, material culture that outlasted decomposition and presented specimens through mediated artistic practices.1 Fascination with the opened body in the early modern period suggests a significant cultural shift in epistemological understandings of the self in Europe at this time, visible in the creation and circulation of specimen images and artefacts. Historian Jonathan Sawday has examined ‘the culture of dissection’ in the seventeenth century that illuminates the shared interests of artists and anatomists in ‘corporeality’ and the relationship between the interior and the

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exterior of the body (1997: 35). Different visual economies were at stake here and combined to formulate a notion of selfhood grounded in expanding conceptions of embodiment and corporeality, according to Sawday. Firstly, dissection involved the development of autopsia, or ‘seeing for oneself’, privileging sight and personal experience as the revealers of truth and knowledge over textual authority and, secondly, teipsum, or the science of ‘seeing oneself’, developed through inner philosophical reflection and a newfound sense of interiority (1997: 48). Dissected remains, or specimens, reproduced in artistic forms, reflected these epistemic and cultural changes, encouraging the study of the inside of the body to better understand the exterior and the constitution of the self. According to the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), by ‘the late 1600s, a new anatomical art-form emerged: the specimen’.2 This claim points to an important and innovative change in their display and representation, now utilizing technologies that could permit the body itself to be exhibited. The NLM identifies the direct intervention of the anatomist into this arena at this time, as the preserver who ‘colored, costumed, and arranged [the material] in glass cases or freestanding displays’ and who, therefore, initiated the translation of the body into three-dimensional biological specimens for show (NLM online). Whilst sculptures, carvings and mannequins had already been in circulation, anatomists started to oversee their production if they were to be used for scientific purposes and some even took on the role of creator and artist in an attempt to guarantee the accuracy and authority of the specimens. Desire for closer fidelity to the body encouraged the anatomists towards finding ways of preserving ‘wet’ biological specimens in glass containers and in trialling various means of conserving ‘dry’ exemplars, mostly through injecting them with wax or resins that could stabilize and fix their condition. Such practices enhanced the drive towards autopsia and teipsum, but the professionalization and status of anatomical science were also now at stake. The specimen as ‘art-form’ became a significant feature of any self-respecting anatomist’s output and collections, reinforcing his (this was an overwhelmingly male occupation) legitimacy through their display.3 Some of these specimen art-forms were artificial, made from wood, papier-mâché or wax and were meant to replicate the original biological form as closely as possible. As specimens of specimens, these medical models were part of the turn to presenting the body

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in three-dimensional forms in medicalized contexts, transposing the body into enduring objects that could capture and clarify the ‘real thing’ for a range of purposes. This feature of the artificial specimen as an aestheticized mimetic technology opens some interesting questions around specimenhood and theatricality that will be the first point of interrogation here and will lead towards an examination of the once-living specimen. Staged as replica specimens, such models make legible the interior of the body for the viewer and help to connect that visceral inside with the outside, inviting embodied engagements that seek to enlighten and educate, whilst also emphasizing the expertise and importance of medical culture. They are artistic interpretations that aim to decode the body and, as such, disturb any neat divisions between art and science, and between representation and notions of scientific objectivity. In other words, there is no direct process of duplication from body to model but instead various points of representational rupture and entanglement with the world in the performativity of the artificial specimen. As models and representations, they exceed the boundaries of science and can be further illuminated by thinking about the theatrical nature of certain model specimens.

Medical models as mimetic technologies Medical models and artificial anatomical preparations answered a range of epistemic desires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries related to understandings of the body, to notions of selfhood and to the development of modern medicine. In a similar vein to Sawday, scholar Francis Barker articulates modernity’s construction of the subject as being dependent upon a perception of two corresponding ideas held within and about the body; in the first, the body is diminished in significance to ‘dead meat’, merely the physical shell surrounding ‘the subject’s more essential consciousness’; and the idea of a second body which resides within the first and is ‘the diagrammatic, fibrous, structured, organised object of investigation’ (Barker 1995: vii). If modern subjectivity is premised on this conception of two bodies existing within one, then the transformation of the cadaver into specimens through the dissective act appears to be an exemplary

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visual analogy and version of this ontology. The flesh is cleaved, as so much meat, in order to access and then construct scientific knowledge about it. Over this historical period, the body becomes ‘the object of disciplinary interventions which will thenceforward sanitise it, train it, and prepare it for labour’ (Barker 1995: vii). Modern subjectivity is dependent upon, in these arguments, an understanding of the body as a kind of specimen and selfhood itself as constituted by specimenhood, augmented by medical practices that enact these new perceptions. Medical models can therefore be understood as part of these dynamics, becoming more refined and accurate as anatomical knowledge, artistry and the technologies for making them improved. By the eighteenth century, wax had become the anatomical modelling material of choice, partly because of its capacity to satisfy these criteria for accuracy and likeness to life, and partly because of  its existing popularity in Catholic iconography, in the form of votive offerings and in creating religious effigies – it was already a tried-and-tested medium for capturing human likenesses.4 In 1771, a ceroplastic (wax modelling) workshop was established in Florence, Italy, as part of the Museo La Specola, in order to expand  its public  science collections, which included ‘zoological specimens, hundreds of wax models of human and animal anatomies, and scientific equipment drawn from Medici cabinets of curiosity’ (Ebenstein 2012: 348). The modeller Clemente Susini (probably) created the Anatomical Venus around 1790 for the museum, a demountable (i.e. capable of being disassembled and reassembled) female anatomical figure that became very popular across Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, generating multiple versions (see Figure 2). Such figures were copied and reproduced across Europe, appearing in newly created medical institutions, museums and in private collections, whilst some versions toured as part of travelling exhibitions. The model captures the height of theatrical displays of anatomical waxes, particularly in late eighteenthcentury Italy. Much has been written about these Venus figures, as they are strange and compelling combinations of the sensual and macabre in the way that they have been staged to adopt often-sexualized, passive and even ecstatic poses against luxurious cushions, wearing pearls at their necks and with flowing or braided hair.5 They seem to relish their opened bodies, even as they bear the wounds of

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FIGURE 2  Anatomical Venus, wax figure of reclining woman, by Clemente Susini, 1771–1800.

extreme bodily violence, dissection and disaggregation. Appearing to live in and through the death of their flesh, impossibly alive to its circumstance, the ‘female figure … always remains beautiful and, one could argue, sexually desirable, and it is the line between her classic, serene beauty and the abjectness of her innards that adds to her special frisson’ (Ebenstein 2012: 349). As a way of knowing the body, these models offer a sanitized dissected scene through eradicating the smells, the fluids and anything unpleasant associated with the dead and opened corpse. The interior of the body can be viewed without fear of contamination or mess, aestheticized to offer a clean and unimpeded view of anatomical detail. More enticing is the fact that these women appear to acquiesce to and even enjoy the penetration of the knife and the gaze, surrendering themselves to this extraordinary physical intrusion through their open and submissive poses. As historian Ludmilla Jordanova notes, it became an established convention, at the end of the eighteenth century, to create such models of dissected women in prone positions of passivity, with an anatomized abdomen that could be opened and viewed through removable parts, gradually permitting the uncovering of the womb

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with a foetus in situ. Jordanova then acknowledges that, whilst male and female models were made, ‘I know of no male models which show the complete body either covered with flesh or recumbent. Instead there are either upright muscle men, with no flesh at all, or severely truncated male torsos’ (1989: 44–5). She is correct that male  waxes were most often displayed in upright poses that presented their musculature or nervous system and hence their vigour, strength and vitality, but there are certainly examples of complete and horizontal male waxes in, for example, Museo La Specola, in Florence, Italy. There is something of a tendency to mythologize the female waxes in various writings about them, adding a peculiarly interesting, gendered, interpretative layer to them. Female wax bodies were clearly focused on the reproductive organs and developing child, unlike the male bodies, that occupied more thoughtful, reflective poses, and thereby echoing anatomical ideology and understanding of the time, where the standard and ideal anatomical form was considered to be the male – the norm. The female body was, therefore, considered to be an exemplary and much sought-after specimen, especially if pregnant, demonstrating as it did its anomalous difference from the male at the site of the womb.6 Based on real bodies, dissected, studied and copied in exacting detail, these Venus models were supposed to represent normative female anatomy and were required to perform the authority of natural science at the time. Created to be housed in the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History (1775–1878) in Florence, they were viewed as intrinsic to Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo’s civic project of facilitating enlightenment in his populace. As part of the museum they had to function as perfect representations of the human body that would also demonstrate the forefront of anatomical knowledge, and therefore reinforce the perceived expertise of its curators and naturalists. Furthermore, they fulfilled a pedagogic function for the museum’s director, Felice Fontana, who believed that the ‘laws of nature would become unproblematically accessible to anyone if the objects were presented in a systematic manner, if they could be taken in instantaneously, and if they were aesthetically pleasing’ (Maerker 2011: 84). Operating as art-forms and as teaching specimens for demonstration and display, these waxes ‘had to represent an ideal type, true to nature’, rather than an individual body, and eliminate all traces of pathology or disease (Maerker 2011: 85).

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Such a principle and expectation of universalizing features seem to be counteracted by the detail of each woman who frames and holds the dissection, the subject of the violation who provides at least an appearance of specificity, even if she too is idealized. Each Venus is staged as a unique individual, with distinguishable characteristics – particular facial expression and pose, hair colour and style, for instance. These aspects are heightened by the blend of the real and the fake, between anatomy carved in wax and the addition of real hair into eyelash and eyebrow follicles, and the use of real ornaments, such as necklaces, ribbons and cushions to recline against. The artistic features underline the tension in providing ‘universally valid representation[s] of the normal human body’ but ‘on the basis of individual specimens’ (Maerker 2011: 85). The creative process included copying dissections of real human bodies, and sometimes many bodies were anatomized to craft one such figure or model, as well as using other models as reference material. In other words, there was a constant shift in the wax working method between copying specific bodies and using them to create a universal anatomical template, where individual anomalies were overlooked or negated in order to make the Venus capable of standing in for a whole type – in this case, the female reproductive body. In a strange rebound dynamic, the inside of the Venus is universalized, as well as her complete physiological form, but her outside features are, to a limited but captivating extent, individualized. She performs her distinctive specimen subjectivity through modes of theatricality, even as she is an object.

The Anatomical Venus as medical surrogate The Venus thus stands in for other bodies as an example, the resultant spectacle of substitutive acts that are multiple, in terms of being dependent on copying significant numbers of dead and dissected bodies. She is a theatricalized medical surrogate and it is her overt staging that captures the imagination and compels spectatorship. Aside from replacing flesh with wax, public anatomy events (such as the one described in the introduction) were disappearing from the scene of European civic life and into the rarefied spaces of medical

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and scientific institutions, so the Venus came to substitute also for that once communal act. Such spectacular rituals of punishment and dismemberment were becoming distasteful to the emergent bourgeoisie, meaning that they were increasingly privatized and exclusive, removed from public spaces. Michel Foucault, for instance, records that ‘[p]rotests against public executions proliferated in the second half of the eighteenth century’ in France, meaning that the explicit and brutal relations between the law and the criminal body had to shift – out of the public eye and into different penal practices (Foucault 1991: 73). With dissection often featuring as part of criminal punishment, it too had to be reconfigured, as separate from the law and gradually restricted to the medical establishment. In Foucault’s terms, that demonstration of power, however, had to be rooted through other means so that the social body could still be controlled and maintained – dissection as punishment through medical display could not simply disappear; something was required to fill the space in social relations in order to sustain mechanisms of dominance and oversight of the population. Performance studies scholar Joseph Roach suggests that such absences continually ‘occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric’, as power structures shift and transform over time. For Roach, this means that ‘culture reproduces and recreates itself’ through processes of surrogacy (1996: 2). Acts of surrogacy plug the emergent gaps that appear in social relations through death and other forms of what Roach calls social ‘departures’ (1996: 2). If anatomists and related medical professionals relied on public dissections in the early modern period to demonstrate their intellectual standing and maintain their status, alongside dissection’s place as part of the judicial and disciplinary framework, its removal from the civic landscape can be interpreted as a new fissure in social networks that required some sort of substitution. Medical culture, and specifically anatomical practice in the eighteenth century, needed to find alternate, surrogate modes of legitimizing its work, away from the violent scene of dissection, but that could continue to demonstrate the significance of the practice as of public benefit and reinforce the expertise of those involved. That authority had to be located and visible elsewhere, so that there was an equivalent public outlet to value the work and allow it to continue. One such ideal surrogate was the Anatomical Venus, substituting as she did the brutality and unpleasantness of anatomization for aestheticized

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wax copy and artistic beauty, whilst also still displaying the extraordinary skills and knowledge of the anatomist and modeller. The Venus fulfils the work of cultural surrogacy by filling the absence of the public dissection with another body. The surrogate may take the form of an effigy according to Roach; as a sculpted copy of the female body the Venus appears to be an obvious example of a ‘fabricated image of a person’ (1996: 36). As an effigy and a substitute, the figure ‘evokes an absence’ that is twofold: the absence of the once living person and the absence of the act of dissection (1996: 36). It removes all that is unpleasant about the work of the anatomist; whilst the flesh disintegrates, these female waxes offer striking transcriptions of the dissection scene into calm, sensual, sterile, legible and fleshy penetrations. Death is withheld, pain is extinguished and the mess of the interior recomposed into organized and comprehensible, dividable sections and parts. They also buttressed against ever-simmering anxieties about dissective activities and therefore the moral rectitude of those undertaking such work through her theatrical presentation – she apparently willingly sublimates the violence and intrusion of eyes and instruments into her body, staged to invite the spectator to take a closer look and to penetrate ever deeper. As with all mimetic objects, including performance and the Venus, the process of surrogacy is not unproblematic, as the ‘substitute either cannot fulfil expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus’ (1996: 2). The model is a durable and simplified version of anatomy that is enlightening, didactic and aesthetically decipherable for its audiences. In this way, the Venus is both art and science, a uniquely crafted rendering of the dissected human form in wax and a demountable, educational object that reveals inner anatomical structures. As an example of a scientific model, it fulfils the functions of teaching specific ideas, as well as helping its audience to learn about the world, more generally (Morrison and Morgan 1999: 10). But these basic functions seem complicated by these particular models; they do indeed offer up human anatomy as a knowable materiality, whilst they also suggest and reveal much more about the world than other scientific models might. Its aestheticization and theatricality make the Venus of and about the world of the eighteenth century in the way that its form highlights such things as historical perceptions of gender at the time, and the locus of power and authority in relation to the body.

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It conveys insights into ontological and epistemological formations of the body and self, into the development and ideologies of medical practice and discourse, and about relations between science and craft at this historical moment. All of this is captured within an often-eroticized scene of the female body that exceeds the expectations of an anatomical model. The ‘uncanniness’ that Roach identifies in processes of cultural surrogacy is mingled here with sexual voyeurism, a permission to penetrate the female body in a kind of pornography of dissection (1996: 2). The pedagogic utility of a demountable figure encourages a stripping of fleshy, visceral layers to access the deep interior of female anatomy, all couched within the discursive and authorizing structures of science. This blurring of social boundaries and acceptability certainly haunted the exhibition of these works and concerns were raised at the time about their potential incitement to lewd behaviours and prurient interest.7 Inevitably, they were compelling objects for visitors and tourists, becoming a highlight of the late eighteenth-century Grand Tour, mixing as they did the anatomical with the erotic, science with art, death with life, brutality with elegance and the animate with the inanimate.8 Part of the perceived uncanniness of the Venus (and of her male model equivalents) surely rests on her theatricality, an element rarely mentioned in the many essays about the model. She is presented as a copy of a woman who appears to be alive and aware of her situation, even perhaps in the throes of ecstasy. She has been created with motion in mind, a body on the verge of movement and caught resting for a moment in a languid pose. The waxwork could thus be described as a tableau vivant, or living picture, containing dynamism and an innate theatricality. As a theatrical mode, the tableau is ‘the arrest of analogic action in a frozen moment, a stop frame, a digit in time, wherein an imposing gesture can be held’ (Roach 1993: 73). Rebecca Schneider, a performance scholar, develops this idea further, noting that a pose is an interval ‘even if momentarily, in what is otherwise experienced as a flow of time’ and it is this hiatus that ‘grant[s] the pose a kind of staginess, or theatricality’ (2011: 90). The Venus is a fixed and static sculpture that nonetheless creates the illusion of a pose that is a fleeting ‘animate stillness’, which gives the spectator permission to study her, to indulge in the science of autopsia and stare intimately at her, and to delve into her interior in a highly charged scene of anatomical penetration (2011: 90).

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Because of the complexity of medical and scientific models, Jordanova advocates approaching them as one might ‘other works of art’, in order to address their ‘strong visual component’ (2004: 449). She then acknowledges ‘the theatricality implicit in modelling’, and easily identifiable in the presentation of the Anatomical Venus as an artistically produced specimen. What is meant by theatricality is a fraught subject, incorporating as it does both a ‘mode of representation’ and a ‘theoretical concept’ that can be used to analyse everyday practices (Davis and Postlewait 2003: 1). It is part of the problem of mimesis because it ‘addresses the gap between reality and its representation’, the rupture that is writ large in relation to the Venus (Davis and Postlewait 2003: 6). As a mimetic surrogate, she arouses anxieties around her substitution of death, of the female body, of the dissective act, and in her permission to transgress certain boundaries for the spectator – in looking at and in touching, even penetrating, the anatomized female body. If theatricality is a worrisome feature, Schneider attributes the ‘undoing of linear time’ as part of that ‘queasiness’ that it engenders and that is visible in the Venus through her blurring of death and aliveness in a single specimen (2011: 27). She is impossibly dead and vital at the same time, a quality that is heightened by the very material used to create the model – wax. Wax simulates skin to an astonishing degree, and it is this characteristic that adds to the Venus’ disquieting verisimilitude. Not only does wax offer a hyper-realistic substitute for skin but it also troubles ontological boundaries through its inherent ambiguity: it is ‘solid and molten, stable and ephemeral, “flesh” and yet simulacrum, seemingly alive, yet merely material’ (Ebenstein 2016: 70). If theatricality depends upon certain kinds of instability between representation and the real, wax appears to be constituted by similar properties. In other words, the force of the Venus for the spectator comes from multiple sources: as an artspecimen theatrically presented, as a mimetic substitute and effigy, and through the theatrical properties of wax used to represent the human body and subject. That these effects congeal around the specimen female body is not surprising, given the fascination with women’s bodies at the time but also because of the relationship between theatricality and women. According to Davis and Postlewait, women have long been ‘portrayed (from the perspective of patriarchy) as … inherently theatrical’, given to excess, artifice and masquerade, and

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demonstrating ‘a talent for sexual display and deception’ (Davis and Postlewait 2003: 17). The Venus plays this theatricality in superfluous ways; there is surely no need for the anatomy to be displayed via this erotic and sensuous body. Her display is the result of the museum director’s philosophy of curatorship, as we have already noted, that spectators could gain anatomical insight from beautifully presented models that contained detailed and complete duplication of anatomical structures. The model had to be perfect and appear to be alive to achieve the intended effect and draw the spectator into the scene. Her hyper-realism, her obliging openness and the absence of death and disease from the image, all work towards ‘lessen[ing] the perceptual distance’ between specimen and viewer, creating ‘a sense of intimacy with the person who is portrayed’ (Kornmeier 2008: 73). Such intimacy is most obviously associated with and established by a female body, so often considered to be the passive recipient of the (male) gaze and penetrative action. The success of the Venus, therefore, rests on its ability to engender curiosity or inquisitiveness in the viewer to the point that they will enter into a tactile and kinaesthetic engagement with the model that moves beyond the act of reading as only a visual and cognitive event – the body must be disassembled. The relative stillness of reading is actioned and performed out of curiosity – to see what is hidden within and beneath the surface – and this in turn fosters embodied learning (or at least this was the anatomist’s hope). Such ‘reading’ requires muscular effort and movement in order to gain full sight of the structures available and depends upon an arousal of a desire to see, which the Venus actively and knowingly encourages through her theatricality. Thus, the model and specimen of the Anatomical Venus is a technology that helps to provide an understanding of the body, its parts, functions and systems. It ‘effects a relationship between scientific theories and the world’ that contains and imbricates all sorts of other social and political mediations, such as between art and science, between male and female, life and death, and surface and depth (Morrison and Morgan 1999: 35). As a medical model, it was created as a ‘means to and a source of knowledge’ but that exceeds its original intention because of its representational status as a surrogate and an effigy (Morrison and Morgan 1999: 35). As an investigative tool, therefore, she represents ideas and theories relating to the newly emergent science of anatomy and new modes of knowledge-seeking

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that engaged with depth and with the revelation of interiors; of understandings of sex and the female body; of reproductive systems; of cultural sensibilities around the body, the self, death, violence, medicine and dissection; and of art in relation to science.

Kőrperwelten: Real specimens on show The ultimate goal of the preservation of specimens has been to be able to conserve actual bodies and body parts for display and study, rather than having to rely on artistic representations of them, such as the Anatomical Venus explored above. These real specimens fill the shelves and storage spaces of medical museums and anatomy departments, mixtures of wet and dry preparations taken directly from the cadaver or via surgical interventions to remove diseased tissue and organs. Wet preparations are usually stored in an alcoholbased solution and sealed in glass jars, so-called pots, whilst dry specimens might be injected with chemicals and dried to preserve them. In each case, the specimen ‘is now as much preservative as it is tissue’ and all such examples are therefore ‘composites’ that act together to provide longevity to the biological part and to maintain lifelike qualities of texture, colour, shape and detail, as far as possible (Alberti 2011: 6). Over the centuries, anatomists have continued to experiment with the methods and technologies of conservancy in order to produce specimens that are resilient and readable, resulting most recently in the late twentieth-century process of ‘plastination’. Echoing the work and desires of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury anatomists to save their handiwork and legitimize their authority, Professor Gunther von Hagens developed this new corpse preservation technique during his tenure as an anatomy technician in the 1970s at Heidelberg University in Germany. As part of his duties preparing specimens and slides for teaching and research, von Hagens became focused on discovering a more ‘realistic and aesthetic’ technique than currently available (von Hagens 2001: 20). In 1978, von Hagens registered his first patent for plastination, a chemical process that involves the exchange of body fluids in the corpse with various polymers in order to keep the body in a more lifelike state after death and anatomization.9 Before the ultimate

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curing process, which stabilizes the plastic into a final form, a specimen can be positioned and manipulated to render it more accessible to viewing. The hardening of the plastic then produces a specimen that has rigidity and strength, meaning that a specimen can retain poses, flaps and layers, in a form of sculptural plasticity – a new kind of art-specimen for the twenty-first century. This preservation technology was initially aimed at and utilized by the wider medical community, who were already invested in an international exchange system of specimens for didactic and interrogatory purposes. In 1997, however, von Hagens moved outside of this closed, medical economy of specimen exchange to present his plastinated cadavers to the general public in an internationally touring and controversial exhibition titled Kőrperwelten (Body Worlds).10 Taking advantage of plastination’s capacity to render the dead body pliable and therefore capable of being modelled into all  manner of poses and views, von Hagens developed his aestheticizing tendencies beyond medical necessity and into the realm of statues and tableaux. The original exhibition comprised whole body plastinates, amongst other preserved specimens, ranging from individual organs to complete systems, such as the cardiovascular network, and multiple cryosections (wafer-thin slices) of bodies. The whole-body plastinates were posed, often staging the bodies in the middle of activities, such as playing football, throwing a javelin and ice skating, and utilizing various props to simulate movement that demonstrates the workings of the body when in action. An anatomized chess player, for instance, leans over a real chess board and its pieces, whilst his dissection focuses on the brain and reveals the intricacies of the spinal cord and neurological pathways, connecting cerebral processing to muscular action for the viewer. The plastinate shows what might be at stake in the body, in terms of locomotion and nerve impulses, in moving the chess pieces through the logic of the game. The use of overtly theatricalized poses in the exhibition11 reiterates the long-standing connection between anatomy and the theatre that has influenced various forms of anatomical representation and display, including the public act of dissection and the creation of the Anatomical Venus. Art historian Julia Hansen has argued for just such a relationship in the anatomy paintings of Rembrandt, for instance, who ‘used various compositional devices to heighten the theatricality of the settings’ (Hansen 1996: 667). Often realistic and

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detailed representations of the specimen body have been supported by illusory, theatrical tropes in their arrangement and framing. In Hansen’s words, ‘realism runs counter to the high degree of artifice’ in these works, colliding the two modes and putting them in tension with each other, but also suggesting a perpetuating and legitimizing milieu for the display of the anatomized figure (Hansen 1996: 665). Such display of scientific enterprise further entangles art and science by unsettling distinctions between the real and the illusory, raising questions about authenticity and truth in these presentations. The representation of science that depends on showing its objects and methods, in the demonstration of anatomization for example, is concerned with the accurate portrayal of its materials. In other words, anatomical episteme depends on appropriate displays of specimens that have been interpreted by medico-science and staged coherently for the spectator/student. But, as with the Venus model, these images and artefacts also depend upon processes of mediation and translation that are contingent and complex. The drive towards realism in anatomical representation started in earnest in the sixteenth century with the illustrations of the anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Perceiving these images as scientifically and pedagogically useful meant that they needed to convey specific aspects of knowledge to the reader and viewer. They had to be clearly defined, proportionally and representationally accurate, showing specimens in optimal positions and perspectives, whilst also capturing their density and textures as far as possible. But this is contradictory in relation to the real body, which is chaotic and intricate, with bewildering intertwinings and layers. Representations of specimens have therefore attempted to contain and clean this messy complexity to provide unobstructed clarity and visibility. Ironically then, the agenda of realism has led to aesthetic practices that actively obscure the body’s dense viscerality. For James Elkins, this amounts to a ‘double resistance’ that ‘represses the complicated and unsettling presence of the opened body’, which simultaneously ‘resists the potential power of the images themselves’ through this sanitizing process (Elkins 1999: 128). Whilst such images and models can indeed be ‘drained’ of disorder, not all power is lost, as we have already seen in relation to the Venus – a model that is ordered for display but still deeply affecting. The same discourse about realistic depiction is articulated by von Hagens when describing the value of his preservation technique

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and outcomes for the Kőrperwelten exhibition. He claims plastination as a ‘realistic’ means of sustaining the cadaver and that the resultant specimens are ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ (von Hagens 2001: 20). The rhetoric is concerned with his aestheticized exhibits that are clearly distanced from the biological events of death and decomposition. In fact, both death and life are both absented from the scene, making claims for realism and authenticity problematic and worthy of investigation here. Philosopher Megan Stern argues that the corpse in the show is edited into a representation of itself and that plastination as a process ‘enhances this sense of the bodies as constructs’ in a strange movement that can also be identified in other corpse preservation techniques, such as embalming (Stern 2003: 3). This procedure can make the dead body look too healthy and rejuvenated, with the representation surpassing the just-dead individual to the extent that friends and relatives can be surprised and shocked by the heightened appearance.12 French philosopher Maurice Blanchot has posited that the corpse, the originary specimen, is already its own double, it is ‘its own image’, as it is something more than the living self and also a resemblance that ultimately resembles nothing else (Blanchot 1982: 258). Its only relation to the world is as ‘an obscure possibility, a shadow’ that is analogous to the image because both are inherently precarious and unfixable (Blanchot 1982: 258). Such ideas further complexify the status of the plastinated cadaver; the specimen-ascorpse is already ‘its own image’, made curious by death and in excess of itself. It is the epitome of Julia Kristeva’s substances of abjection, beyond pus, blood and vomit, neither subject nor object, but ‘something rejected from which one does not part’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). Unable to signify anything other than itself, the corpse even fails to successfully represent the person it once was. It is an excess of pure resemblance, in Blanchot’s terms, and empty in its deathly absence. This uncanny mixture is then made to re-enter representational economies through the process of plastination and subsequent display in the exhibition. If, however, representation ‘produces ruptures and gaps’ and ultimately ‘fails to reproduce the real exactly’, re-presenting the corpse as a plastinated specimen and claiming that it is realistic is a flawed project (Phelan 1993: 2). Von Hagens’ claims that his specimens are ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ are thus untenable, denying as they do the complexity of the ontology of the corpse and the impact of entering it into representational

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economies that rely on preservation and aestheticization. Such problems are manifest in the behaviour of some visitors to Kőrperwelten, when their outrage at the staging of dead bodies has been channelled into damaging them. For example, in London in March 2002, a visitor attacked one of the plastinates with a hammer because the show had made him ‘incandescent with rage after he watched a five-year old girl being admitted’ (Littlejohn 2002: 23). This infliction of violence on a corpse is unthinkable in other contexts, so it is safe to assume that the failure of the platinates to appear as ‘real’ specimens, through their presentation and theatricality, circumvents traditional engagements with dead bodies, which are usually strongly enmeshed with sensibilities of dignity and respect.

Kőrperwelten and theatricality Peggy Phelan claims that ‘the real is what theatre defines itself against, even while reduplicating its effects’ (Phelan 1993: 3). So, even though the real might appear in the theatrical frame, with real bodies and objects, for instance, the theatre is only ever able to reproduce its effects because of its entry into systems of representation. In a very tangible way, as we have seen, the plastinated bodies in Kőrperwelten do not appear to be ‘real’; they are too dry, too odourless, too staged and too inanimate to be considered real in any cadaver-like sense. Occasionally, body hair, eyelashes or nails might shock one into remembering the deceased but, overall, they remain distant from connections with the corpse. They teeter on the cusp of being subsumed within theatrical paradigms because of von Hagens’ interventions in their constitution and display that cement their representational status and make them the subject of aesthetic criticism. The deliberate posing of the bodies stages them in particular ways, through gesture and suggested movement, that are innately theatrical and incongruent with scientific notions of human specimen display that are supposed to be objective and undramatic. Not only has von Hagens elected to show cadavers to the public but, far more controversially, he has added this ‘artistic’ element that is highly unusual for such exhibitions. Such artistry is further heightened by some of the specimens being invested in their own self-display of their anatomy, and

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which recalls pictorial representations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of dissected bodies and, indeed, the Anatomical Venus. The plastinated cadaver ‘shows off’ its own anatomical details in a multitude of gestures and positions, as varied and infinite as the imagination of von Hagens, and reminiscent of anatomical iconography. Such figures often involved showing the body as the spectacle of the unseen, with bodies participating in their own revelation, holding back their skin in order to better display their internal organs for the viewer. They were also invariably drawn or posed in action, against striking landscapes and environments, seemingly proud and acquiescent in their own dismemberment. Sawday describes this principle as that of ‘living anatomy’, where dissected specimens were represented as being alive and fully participant in the dissective process (1995: 114). The body itself demonstrated the truth of its interior, a subject reliable as a source of knowledge and of value, whilst also depicting the cadaver far removed from the realities of the anatomy table, embedded in landscapes that situated them as liminal figures ‘existing at the margin of living society, while, equally, they participate[d] in a new community of the dead’ (1995: 114). For Sawday, these pictures were a form of propaganda for the anatomists that denied the outright destruction of the body; instead, ‘the body willingly allowed the anatomist to assist the general process of decay and dissolution’ (1995: 116). The specimens in Kőrperwelten and the Anatomical Venuses replicate these techniques of living anatomy, displaying themselves to the viewer. One such plastinated example is a heavily pregnant woman, demonstrating herself openly by propping up her head and upper torso, with one hand placed provocatively behind her head, whilst she lies in a sexualized position on her side. Echoing the erotic poses of the Anatomical Venus, the lines between scientific objectivity and gendered display are crossed in this contemporary exhibition. In fact, the cadavers of pregnant women in the exhibition have received much of the media attention as being indicative of its most disturbing content. One particular protestor in London, Amanda Wilson, decided to protest against the ‘sexism’ of the exhibition, where male plastinates far outnumbered those of females. To draw attention to this imbalance, Wilson undressed and climbed onto an exhibit of a plastinated horse and rider. This unequal display reinforces the idea that the female body is only valuable because of its reproductive capacities which, if absent or damaged, render the

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body worthless to science, where the male continues to be accepted as the ideal standard of anatomy. The only reason to have female bodies on show at all is to display the organs of generation and, often, the developing foetus. Staged in an iconic erotic manner and with her gaze averted from the viewer, the lingering look on the plastinate’s opened body is encouraged by her inability to look back at the spectator. The whole exhibition depends on offering the spectator this form of scopophilic pleasure: the pleasure of looking in itself subjects others to a controlling gaze. The living anatomy or self-display of the specimen that is manifest in the Venus and the plastinate reinforces these spectatorial drives by overtly permitting and encouraging them. The specimen bodies examined here, both wax and plastic, have been made to acknowledge this dependence on the viewer through their poses that echo ‘living anatomy’, compliant in their own demonstration. They are staged to flaunt their anatomies, often in excessive, even burlesque, ways with their positions and props that make explicit that connection between object and audience. Theatricality has often been determined as excessive, an overabundance of the spectacular or the explicitly staged that has then become the subject of various attempts to restrain its exuberance. Von Hagen’s project seems to have launched him into a terrain deemed as ‘excessive’ in various ways. His desire to exhibit his specimens as artforms has placed him well outside of usual practices of specimen preservation for scientific and teaching purposes. Excess is inscribed in his desire to plastinate whole cadavers rather than unique parts; in his manner of posing them rhetorically, as though living; in his intention to bring the work to the layperson; and excess has even been identified as one of his personality traits, making him appear eccentric and quirky as an individual. But the subject of his excess – dissection and its representations – is as embedded in these circuits of plethora, sometimes relishing the superfluity, through exaggerating it and, at other junctures, struggling to deny its profusion. Excess contains this doubled meaning that it constantly plays between, on the one hand a joyful, unrestrained abundance and on the other a glut of matter that is distasteful and debauched. For some, the corpse as leftover entity, the remaining presence after life, is surely a beneficent excess. For medico-science it forms the foundation of medical knowledge, and as such is made to relinquish its secrets about the animate and live body.

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But this process creates its own paradoxical excess as the body is fragmented and dismembered during anatomization that carefully exposes layer after layer and structures within structures. Early modern iconography of dissective practice is explicit about this creation of excess, with the repeated motif of a basket or some other container appearing near the table to catch and hold body parts as they become superfluous. Once incised, removed and studied, each part is made redundant – unable to be replaced and now more liable to rapid decomposition. This is partly what the process of plastination subverts, by negating dissective excess through enabling a retention of all the body parts and layers: ‘Plastination … makes it possible to produce “exploded-view” specimens, “open-door” specimens and “open-drawer” specimens’ that maintain the body’s overall integrity and complexity, without the traditional reductive imperative (von Hagens 2001: 21). For the spectator at Kőrperwelten and of the Venus, there is a distinct awareness of excess knowledge being presented to the layperson. One has only the smallest insight into the details and complexities of each specimen, aided by various labels and explanatory texts. The thrill of recognition is obvious when one does come to some realization or understanding about the anatomy being displayed. The theatricality of these specimens might work to alleviate the tension that might accrue around this sensory overload. The display of human interiors that are simultaneously a reflection of the spectator, and yet are deeply unknown and unrecognizable by most people, could be a deeply disturbing experience but there is something in the rhetorical poses that dissipates this dynamic. The excess can be intellectually processed by the complicity of the plastinate and waxwork in its own display. At one level, they seem playful and appear to take pleasure in their spectacularization and through this, the spectator is empowered. Instead of feeling overawed and diminished by the extravagance of the opened corpse, the spectator is enabled to take control of their ocular desires and exert a certain power over the cadaver through the theatricality of self-display. The performed specimen body is, to some extent, tamed by this permission and encouragement to look. On another level, the staged bodies, real and imagined, are made strange through their display, waivering between the representation of death and life in ways that are uncanny and discomforting. They draw attention to their own constructedness as representations, revealing more

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than intended and disrupting notions of scientific objectivity, even as they aim to legitimize medical knowledge. As models and props, they demonstrate anatomical skill and understanding through modes of theatricality that also connect the specimens to their wider social and political contexts. Exposing gendered ways of conceiving of specimen bodies and illuminating the ethical implications of specimen displays, they expose the representational dynamics at work in such biomedical spectacles.

2 The Ethics of Specimenhood

The creation of specimens from the body, whether human or nonhuman, is weighted with ethical concerns that have become more public and more contested over time. A clear example emerges from the public discourse around Kőrperwelten, the commercial anatomical exhibition explored in the previous chapter, that was heavily inflected with arguments about the dignified treatment of the dead and whether presenting dead bodies in an exhibition constituted such appropriate handling. Concerns were also repeatedly raised about the provenance of the bodies, particularly when the exhibition first appeared; people wanted to know where the human corpses had come from and whether consent had been given for their post-mortem display. With the director of the exhibition, Gunther von Hagens, setting up plastination laboratories in China and Kyrgyzstan, the origins of the cadavers were disputed, with fears that they were those of executed criminals who would not have been asked for their consent, given their lack of basic human rights. To calm the furore, the exhibition now places great emphasis on cadaver donation, with much encouragement for visitors to become donors to have their bodies immortalized in the future with their full knowledge and assent. Questions still remain, however, regarding whether corpses should be staged for public consumption. Can scientific specimens be presented in artistic contexts without demeaning them? How is consent given in relation to specimen creation in any environment, whether artistic or medical, and what exactly is being consented to? With wet or soft-bodied specimens being historically most often associated with the products of anatomical dissection, these practices have always had to be carefully circumscribed by a variety

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of historically contingent discursive formations that may include legal,  religious and social prescriptions. These seek to actively curb anxieties about the transgressive potential inherent in the act of dismembering the dead body and regularly emerge in the wake of scandal linked to these practices, as will be explored. In order to consider the specimen and constructions of specimenhood in contemporary performance and wider culture in more detail, this chapter will examine significant historical moments and events in medical history that have drawn attention to ethical and social concerns around such issues as consent and property rights in the body. These have a direct bearing on the specimen and how it is understood, conceptualized and framed within medical, artistic, social and legal contexts. Such moments have led to an ongoing debate and constant re-evaluation about such fundamental questions as: do we own our bodies? What can be done to our bodies and by whom? What rights do we have over them and any removed biological materials in various contexts? What principles can or should be applied to answer and clarify these dilemmas? Given the social, cultural, ontological and epistemological tensions involved, the first half of the chapter will outline debates around the key issues of specimenhood that involve consent, ownership, autonomy, integrity and dignity of the body and its parts, including relevant legal approaches to these matters. The second half of the chapter will outline aspects of the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, particularly in relation to the emergence of modern medicine, his idea of biopolitics and the impact of neoliberalism in the twentieth century on subjectification. Foucault’s thinking on the operations of power, discursive structures and the gaze provide a productive means of theorizing the contemporary biomedical milieu and the construction of specimenhood that this book seeks to interrogate. The chapter deliberately leaves theatre and performance to one side in order to return to its analysis in the following chapters with fresh insights and a stronger awareness of the social, political and legal context that surrounds specimens, and which help to constitute specimenhood.

Dissection and its transgressions In his book about transgression and art, Anthony Julius summarizes the notion of transgression as having ‘four essential meanings’,

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which are the denying of doctrinal truths; rule-breaking, including the violating of principles, conventions, pieties or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries (2002: 18). I would argue that, to differing degrees, the bodies as specimens presented in these pages transgress in the ways that Julius suggests. As a practice engaged in such erasing and disordering of physical boundaries, if not conceptual ones, through incision and partition, dissection, as the key means of producing specimens, has long troubled and fascinated the lay onlooker in its brutal division of the body. Full of violence that fragments the subject, it has been a practice fraught with anxiety and, from the early modern period onwards, its occurrence has become enmeshed with a variety of legitimizing frameworks in order to authorize it and make it more acceptable to the public. As outlined in the introduction, public dissections, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became highly organized and regulated procedures that involved scholastic, religious and municipal authorities working co-operatively. The precise details regarding the event were laid down as official rules that were circumscribed by law so that anatomization was sanctioned as an appropriate legal, cultural and even religious tool. With the body increasingly identified in the early modern period as the ‘liber corporum – the book of the body written by God’, so the anatomist was charged with uncovering the beauty and skill of the deity’s handiwork inside the corpse (Sawday 1995: 135). The act of dissection, therefore, was contained by civic rituals that tried to curtail any implication of excess, and imposed order and decorum instead. Legitimized by legal and religious bodies and tied to ideas of corporal punishment but also celebrated as a means of seeing the glory of divine creation inside the body, these moments were heavily bounded to mitigate their potential for social breakdown. As practices of and knowledge from dissection developed, the severe restriction on the number of anatomies carried out each year became problematic for the medical establishment, which desired more specimens for its work than provided under the law. In Padua, Italy, for example, this had been set at only two cadavers per year, whilst in England, King Henry VIII had granted the bodies of four executed felons annually for scientific work in 1540 and in the 1660s King Charles II extended that to six bodies per annum (Richardson 1988: 36). Because of these legislative restrictions, body

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snatching became a popular trade in Britain by the eighteenth century to satisfy the demands of the anatomists and emergent anatomy schools, who needed a regular supply of corpses. Other European countries found ways of providing more cadavers, allowing the dissection of unclaimed bodies and suicide cases, for instance, that avoided a similar emergence of body snatching (Bailey 1991: 13–14). This clandestine, criminal trade encouraged ‘resurrection’ men to desecrate new burial sites in order to extract fresh corpses for onward sale to the anatomists. It became a scandalous enterprise and a source of great public consternation, not least because of the case of William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh, that eventually led to the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act. Burke and Hare capitalized on the fact that by 1827–8 ‘the bodies of the poor had become worth more dead than alive’ and began murdering the poor and destitute in order to deliver them to the Edinburgh anatomy school and into the hands of the anatomist Dr Robert Knox (Richardson 1988: 132). The Anatomy Act ‘remains the basis of modern law on the subject’ and it ‘recommended … the government should confiscate the bodies of paupers dying in workhouses and hospitals, too poor to pay for their own funerals’ (Richardson 1988: xv). It dealt with the oversight and administration of dissection, recognizing it as an important feature of medical training and research, but that its hitherto unregulated nature had led to criminal acts which needed to be prevented. It clarified the ‘law concerning the legality of bequest and dissection’, whilst prohibiting dissection as a juridical punishment for murder (Richardson 1988: 207). The bodies of the poor were now permissible anatomical subjects, provided that they had not expressly written or declared in front of witnesses that they did not wish for this to happen. Richardson points out that the law was curiously silent on the acquisition of body parts as specimens. It required the Christian burial of all remains following dissection but made no mention of the possibility of keeping any for study or demonstration, and it ‘did nothing to specify or clarify their legal or property status’ (Richardson 1988: 207). Richardson surmises that this lacuna in the text was to placate those who had insisted on the necessity of a formal burial after dissection. To include allowances to further raid the body for its parts could be seen as undermining that provision (Richardson 1988: 208). The Act did put an end to the grave-digging trade, although it did not

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explicitly prohibit it; the provision of the bodies of the poor meant that such a trade was no longer necessary to feed demand. The lack of attention to the act of stealing cadavers in the legislation was another strange omission; it reflected current legal understandings about the body: ‘[s]tealing a shroud or coffin was a felony, but stealing a corpse was only a misdemeanour’, because ‘the law held that a dead body was nobody’s property’ (Bailey 1991: 21). In terms of grave-robbing, it meant that the resurrectionists were careful to replace belongings, such as shrouds, into the empty coffin, for stealing those items carried a heavier penalty than passing the actual corpse to an anatomist for financial gain. This rather grisly drama sets the scene for the first aspect of the law that we will consider in relation to specimens, as it has important ramifications. It begs the central question of whether we own our own bodies under current English law. As lawyer Rohan Hardcastle clarifies, ‘[i]n general, English law has been guided by the “no  property” principle (the principle which declares that there is no property in corpses)’ (2009: 12). This includes specimen materials derived from the body, such that ‘neither existing legislation nor the common law currently recognises a source’s property rights to separated biological materials’ (2009: 12). In other words, in law we do not own our bodies, or any parts separated from it: ‘the common law posits that something can be either a person or an object – but not both – and that only objects can be regulated by property holding’ (Dickenson 2007: 4). This is the legal dilemma highlighted by the eighteenth-century body snatchers and still a major source of debate, particularly in the light of various medicoscientific advances that make bodies and body parts increasingly valuable to a range of ‘users’.

Who owns the specimen? If English law maintains the ‘no property’ principle in the body and any removed parts, the ownership of any specimen becomes a contentious issue. Who has future rights over the specimen – the person from whom it was extracted or the recipient? In essence, ‘the common law generally assumes either that it has been abandoned by its original “owner,” or that it is and was always res nullius,

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no one’s thing, belonging to no one when removed’ (Dickenson 2007: 3). With the development of organ and tissue transplants in the twentieth century, the onward benefit and, even, profit to be gained from separated parts, dead or alive, have become a more pressing concern, and this has increased with capabilities around DNA extraction from any such samples. There are now substantial advances to be made from abandoned materials from corpses and biopsies, such that researchers and biotech companies can process and store biological data for commercial ends and potential profit. The lack of rights in our own bio-materials has caught the public by surprise as these realizations have dawned and as biomedical science has found ways to further capitalize on bodies. One such case was that of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, in the United States. Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer and in 1951 was being treated at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, USA. During a biopsy, some of her cancer cells were removed and, without her knowledge or consent, they were sent to the laboratory of George Gey, ‘whose central goal was to mimic the functions of the body to such a degree that human cells could be grown apart from the body and used in its place in experiments’ (Landecker 2007: 140). Gey discovered that Lacks’ cancer cells were unusually robust and provided him with an immortal, self-replicating cell line, henceforward called HeLa, that could be shared with other scientists on a global scale. From a research perspective, this meant that scientists could be working on the same material at the same time, in different places with different research agendas, making this ‘an utterly new mode of existence for human matter’ (Landecker 2007: 140). As sociologist Hannah Landecker goes on to explain, ‘HeLa was both the first and the standard example of large-scale in vitro [taking place outside of a living body] reproduction of a human specimen that could be everyone’s specimen, shipped and mass reproduced, cloned and frozen’ (Landecker 2007: 161). Lacks died in October 1951, unaware that her cells were so scientifically significant, a fact that remained hidden from her family until the 1970s. Unbeknownst to Lacks and her descendants, her cells had become a global commodity, underpinning significant medical research and with ongoing efficacy. The cell line continues to be used as standard biological research material and Lacks’ story has entered public consciousness through media coverage, books, film1

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and performance.2 Part of this fascination is to do with questions of specimenhood that Lacks’ story highlights: who owns the body, if not the individual? Who has rights over the body and at what point, if any? How can we protect our biological material in relation to any future use? It also raises the issue of consent, a much more rigorously understood and practised concept now than in the 1950s but one still open to dubious interpretations and substandard oversight, as more recent examples show. Matters of consent and property in the body came to a head in Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s in relation to bio-specimens, when a series of scandals erupted around the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital or Alder Hey.3 It came to light that these institutions, and others, were retaining organs and tissues removed from children at post-mortems without consent and often on a regular and systematic basis. A public inquiry followed in 1999 and eventually led to the passing of the UK Human Tissue Act (HTA) in 2004.4 The Act dealt with ‘the removal, storage, use and disposal of human tissue’ and, as such, superseded the Anatomy Acts of 1832 and 1984. This legislation, once again, maintains a distance from property rights in the body, relying instead on ‘an informed consent model, stressing the personal right of the donor or her family to give or withhold consent to further uses of organs and tissues removed from the body’ (Dickenson 2007: 20). Hardcastle summarizes that under the HTA, the ‘removal of bodily materials continues to be governed by the common law, including the allimportant principle of consent and laws relating to battery and negligence’ (2009: 104, emphasis in original). He expresses concern that the law has not been fully clarified through the HTA because it continues to sidestep the issue of ‘no property’, a point made evident through at least two exceptions that cloud the issue – the application of human skill to transplant material and in relation to cell lines, such as HeLa (2009: 121). The ‘work or skill exception’ in relation to human specimens was highlighted in 1999 in Britain in the case of artist AnthonyNoel Kelly and technician Niel Lindsay. Kelly had permission to work at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London in order to study and draw anatomical specimens in their collection. Kelly involved Lindsay, a technician at the RCS, in taking some of the specimens to his home where he used them to cast body parts for an art exhibition. Once discovered, both men were tried under the

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Theft Act 1968. At the trial and at appeal, they invoked the ‘no property’ principle in their defence – the specimens could not have been stolen because they are not considered to be property under common law. They were found guilty, however, under the ‘work or skill exception’ which determines that biological material may be regarded as property if human skill has been applied to it (2009: 28–33).5 For medical ethicist Donna Dickenson, this represents a ‘precedent in favour of researchers and doctors, who are judged to have put sufficient expertise and labour into the extraction and preservation of the body parts to have acquired a right against their unauthorised taking’ (2007: 17). In other words, through processes of dissection and preservation, for example, the law deems the specimen the property of those who have carried out this work and so found in favour of the RCS. Dickenson points out that, ironically, the rights of the person of origin were treated as immaterial to the case. In the HTA also, the ‘work and skill exception’ is invoked in relation to certain ‘controlled materials’, including gametes, embryos and ‘material which is the subject of property because of an application of human skill’ (Hardcastle 2009: 117). The second exception that gives Hardcastle pause is that of cell lines, as the Act also excludes them ‘from the prohibition because they are not regarded as material “from a human body”’ (2009: 117). As in the case of Lacks, where the scientist Gey worked on her cells in his laboratory, cell lines are defined in the HTA as material that is created outside of the body. This suggests that if Lacks were to bring a case against Gey under the HTA, the prosecution could only attend to the issue of consent; Lacks would still not have property rights in her immortal cell line. The focus on consent and these two exemptions leads Hardcastle to the conclusion that the HTA ‘avoids the first-order legal question of whether there are circumstances that should properly be seen as creating property rights in separated biological materials. As long as this question remains unanswered, English law cannot provide the necessary foundation for a coherent structure of property rights and non-proprietary interests’ (2009: 122). This lacuna in the common law, identified by Hardcastle and others,6 is tested by new biotechnologies that blur once-clearer boundaries between person and thing. The legal basis comes from the ethical arguments of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who claimed that ‘a person … is not property’ and ‘so he cannot be a

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thing such as he might own; for it is impossible, of course, to be at once a thing and a person, a proprietor and a property at the same time’ (Kant in Heath and Schneewind 1997: 157). Kant, of course, could not envisage medical advances such as organ transplantations or assisted reproductive technologies that could disrupt these seemingly simple distinctions. Such developments also mean that a wider range of exceptions to the ‘no property’ principle are now being identified in court cases. Prosecutions usually proceed based on other branches of the law, such as contract law, constitutional rights to privacy or statutory rights concerning consent (Wall 2015: 22–5). For a legal scholar such as Jess Wall, these instances raise the question ‘of whether property law represents the most appropriate configuration of rights and duties for the governance of the use and storage of bodily material’, as it often raises more questions than solutions (Wall 2015: 37). In terms of bio-specimens, the rights over separated biological materials are the subject of legal, ethical and social contestation which recent legislation, such as the HTA, has not clarified or answered. Should we, for example, be able to claim property rights over our blood samples or DNA, particularly as our bio-products might generate future commercial materials? Various scandals, such as that at Alder Hey, ‘have strengthened human rights discourse around biomedicine and the respect owed to human bodies’ and also  focused attention on issues of human dignity (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 38). There are only certain instances under the HTA where removed biological material, separated from the human body, can be classified as ‘a thing’, a change in categorization that can permit the identification of a detached specimen as potentially having property rights attached to it (Hardcastle 2009: 15). Hardcastle contrasts this with the ‘protection afforded by the law to invasions of an individual’s own body’ (Hardcastle 2009: 15–16). Bodily integrity and autonomy define ‘the right to have one’s own body whole and intact and (on reaching an age of understanding) to take decisions about one’s own body’ (Herring and Wall 2017: 568). This prohibits unwelcome and unauthorized intrusions into and on the body and is underpinned by notions of consent. In medical terms, a patient must agree to be subjected to medical procedures and be fully informed of treatment plans and their associated risks. Informed consent underpins the legal framework in the HTA and ironically is ‘the mechanism that transforms a gift into property’,

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according to social scientists Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell (2006: 71). An individual can choose to consent to having their biological material extracted, stored and used for medical research and thereby they transfer that material, as property, to the researcher, in a process ‘understood to protect the autonomy and dignity’ of the donor (2006). Informed consent is meant to guard against exploitation, coercion and illicit medical practices, but for Waldby and Mitchell this does not quite add up, as the donated material includes ‘transfer of legal claim to the tissue’ (2006: 72). In other words, once informed consent has been given, the donor/ patient gives up all further stakes in the material and it cannot be recovered at a later date. For Waldby and Mitchell this becomes a ‘kind of surrogate property act’, which transfers all rights away from the originator of the specimen (2006: 72). If we can consent to having body parts separated from ourselves and used elsewhere, in laboratories or in other bodies, then it is clear, as medical ethicist Alastair Campbell points out, that our bodies are  in some senses ‘alienable’ (capable of being sold or transferred) and, if alienable, then ‘why should they not also be seen as tradeable  – fungible and commensurable in monetary terms?’ (2009: 18). But for many, there is a profound difference between the altruistic act of donation through informed consent and the suggestion of a trade in body parts. First, this trade is prohibited by law as it infringes on the ‘no property’ principle, whereby you cannot sell what you do not own, a point highlighted by the 1999 case of a human kidney being put up for auction on eBay. The advert was posted in Florida, USA, and read: ‘Fully functioning kidney for sale. You can choose either kidney. Buyer pays all transplant and medical costs. Of course, only one for sale, as I need the other one to live. Serious bids only’ (Mullins 1999: online). Jokes aside, by the time that eBay removed the advert, bids had exceeded $5.7 million. In terms of legislation, the HTA incorporates prohibitions against the trafficking and sale of transplantable organs for commercial gain, as is the case in US federal law and the reason that eBay had to remove the item from auction. A similar case emerged in the UK in 2007 when Daniel Tuck, from Birmingham, posted the sale of one of his kidneys on an internet chatroom site dedicated to those suffering from kidney disease. Having agreed a price of £24,000 with an undercover journalist, he was prosecuted under the HTA (Condron 2007: online). These cases reinforce the common law

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principle of ‘no property’ in the body by extending to an injunction against the body’s commodification and entry into market economies of exchange. Secondly, in relation to a consideration of body parts being alienable, this arouses deep seated philosophical and ontological arguments about the dignity of the body and what constitutes its respectful treatment. For Campbell, it ‘relates to a potential de-humanization of the self’, where the body might become just another part of the neoliberal landscape, and where everything is commodified (2009: 18). Conceptions of human dignity have become integral to these debates, particularly as they have become a key part of the discourse on human rights in international law. This now ubiquitous address to human dignity emerged as a result of responses to the genocide of the Second World War. Horror at the Holocaust and the systematic annihilation of Jewish people and other minority groups led to the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The document puts human dignity front and centre, evoking it in the very first line of text. Here it acknowledges that ‘the inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’.7 Article 1 then reiterates this claim, stating that ‘[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. Although not legally binding, the Declaration has been used to underpin a range of international instruments of law and other guidelines, such as the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights (2005), which reiterates the concept of human dignity as central within the ambit of medical and scientific practice. Each human right is predicated on human dignity as being a central and driving force, even though there is no fixed definition or agreed understanding of this concept. It does, however, contain the idea of human exceptionalism in implying that humans have innate and unique qualities or traits that need to be protected. This protection then extends to all humans, wherever and whomever they are. Human dignity now plays a fundamental role in international biomedical law because of this inclusion in human rights frameworks. With human rights focusing on such areas as the right to privacy, the rights of the family, the right to life and adequate healthcare, there are obvious overlaps with biomedical

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concerns (Andorno 2009: 4–5). These might include such aspects as patient confidentiality, use of informed consent, use of reproductive technologies and access to treatment. But, at an ontological level, the idea of human dignity and the uniqueness of the human also intersect with biomedical advances in things like genetic engineering and 3-D printing. If there is something inherently in or about the human that requires legal protection, then what is at stake in the future potential of bio-technologies that seek to replicate and replace human parts? How many parts can be replaced or modified before the idea of the ‘human’ becomes anomalous or problematic? Roberto Andorno, a medical ethicist, suggests that the idea of human dignity might act ‘as the last barrier against the alteration of some basic features of the human species’, when such modifications are becoming more radical and disruptive of traditional ideas of ‘the body’ (Andorno 2009: 5). Human dignity also plays a part in debates about organ transplantation, particularly those that attend to the current shortage of organs for transplant. Long-running discussions about systems of organ donation versus allowing patients to buy and sell  them in a regulated economy often circulate around dignity, which can be thought to be ‘destroyed if any part of the body is assigned a market value and rendered alienable’ (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 19). Ideas of dignity and respect for the body also clearly informed how parents and public alike reacted to the Alder Hey scandal and others, as noted above. Removing organs without consent or even acknowledgement was and is perceived to be deeply disrespectful and wholly lacking in concern or empathy for the feelings and desires of bereaved relatives about the bodies of loved ones after death and how they should be treated. In fact, the idea of dignity can underpin every aspect of the medical encounter, from the initial consultation in a doctor’s surgery to the treatment offered, and every interaction and intervention thereafter; this explains why  it has become a pervasive part of bioethics and biomedical law, and why it preoccupies so many academic texts and analyses. Throughout these discussions and within much of the literature, notions of the body and the subject are presented as seemingly universal and neutral terms. Such assumptions, however, are increasingly being contested and challenged as masking inequalities and prejudices that potentially undermine such principles as informed consent and dignity. Doctor and educator,

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Yechiel Barilan, for instance, draws attention to the fairly new acceptance that ‘women’s equality is essential to human dignity’ and, until now, medicine has engaged with some heavily gendered and therefore biased attitudes to women (2012: 40). He points to research, as an example, that indicates that in some contexts females suffer from higher rates of mortality, alongside poorer nutritional health and worse protection than males from disease and accidents (2012:  40). It is significant to note, therefore, that women’s specimenhood might be different from and unequal to that of men, a factor that can also apply to marginalized groups, such as those with impairments.

Philosophies of specimenhood Human rights and bioethical discourse have been based on philosophical ideas about the modernist subject as an autonomous, rational and moral agent. Whilst concepts such as consent and dignity appear to be impartial in their supposed application to all humans, critics have identified problematic underpinnings in these modernist ideas of the subject because of their engagement with the male as the normative standard of reference. What is unspoken in these attributes of autonomy, rationality and morality, is their connection to assumed masculine traits and, therefore, they exclude women who are presumed to have intrinsic connections with their bodies, emotions and embodiment (Shildrick 1997: 146–7). This power differential, which enables full subjectivity for some, means that others are necessarily excluded from this status, including the sick and the impaired, who ‘become the (feminised) other’ (Shildrick 1997: 100). So, whilst legal instruments explored in the previous section might suppose political neutrality around concepts of the body and the principles to which it is held and treated, feminist scholars raise important questions about their very basis in particular ideologies and biases that prioritize the white, nondisabled, middle-class, educated male. This suggests that bodiesas-specimens are liable to similar conceptual asymmetries and, therefore, unequal treatment and attention, an idea borne out in the analysis of anatomical study in the previous chapter. With the male body deemed to be the ideal physiological form, the female

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body has often been treated less seriously, as anomalous and only of value in relation to human reproduction. The final sections of this chapter are interested in how these and other power relations have impacted on understandings of the self and subjectivity up to the contemporary moment. Examining these issues in relation to medicine, through an engagement with the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, the analysis focuses on the construction of specimenhood as a significant but unequal subject position. According to Foucault, all subjectivity is constituted through a range of material and linguistic practices that are ‘continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, [and] govern our gestures’, in an ongoing circulation of power (Foucault 1980: 97). He analysed medicine as one such discursive practice in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973), and particularly the changes that emerged at the start of the nineteenth century to the ways that the body and disease were conceived of. In thinking specifically about the formation of specimenhood as a distinct aspect of subjectivity, Foucault’s identification of medicine’s newfound attention to the opposition between the normal and the pathological is significant. He suggested that ideas about the individual, about society and about race, for example, were dependent upon this oppositional thinking, where health was defined in contradistinction to illness and disease. This required the formation of norms and standard reference points against which knowledge and concepts could be measured and weighed. Foucault argued that part of this shift was informed by the emergence of the discipline of pathological anatomy, where disease could be studied in the corpse and used to reflect on illness in the living body, in a binary of the healthy and the morbid. It is possible at this point to start to interconnect these ideas and histories with the use and status of the medical specimen as a comparative subject at this time, stored and displayed to show norms but, increasingly in the nineteenth century, used to construct ideas of difference and deviation. This is the historical moment, in fact, when medical museums became firmly established as the repositories of pathological specimens and ‘[a]bnormality was materially constructed in the … museum’ (Alberti 2011: 12). The corpse was anatomized and fragmented in order to create specimens, not of the idealized, perfect body of the eighteenth century, as seen in the medical waxes (see Chapter 1), but now to capture the endless diversity of the diseased body. Preserved

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specimens became directed towards retrieving and storing the anomalous and unusual, whilst the nineteenth century also saw the development of the wax moulage (mould) that was utilized to copy pathologies, particularly those revealed on the surface of the skin, such as syphilis. Foucault’s work on medical perception included his foregrounding of the ‘act of seeing’ and ‘the gaze’ as fundamental to the new logic of medical discursive power and knowledge, and thus to the formation of specimenhood (1973: ix). This gaze was constitutive of the emerging medical institutions in the nineteenth century – the clinic of the Foucault’s book title – and of the position of the doctor within their structures, who now had the authority, training and legitimacy to examine, diagnose and treat patients under his care. The medical gaze was increasingly directed towards the pathological and the atypical, with physicians now also able to make diagnostic determinations based on calculation and perceived risks (1973: 89). Symptoms of disease became the focus of medical practice as doctors shifted from asking ‘what is the matter with you’ to ‘where does it hurt?’ (1973: xviii). For Foucault, this is the key to the new structures and organization of the doctor–patient relationship, reflecting the development of modern medicine as it is recognized today. His concept of the medical gaze has become a potent idea in articulating certain power relations in the doctor– patient dynamic. As part of the process of analysing and diagnosing a patient, the medical gaze has been characterized as objectifying and dehumanizing, with the medic reducing the unwell only to symptoms and illnesses. He goes as far as to describe this look, that both generates scientific knowledge and displays the sick body as a pedagogical resource, as ‘a tacit form of violence’ because of its inherent exploitative and inhuman aspect (Foucault 1973: 84). Such power in the gaze of medical practice to fragment, separate and render passive is also a vital constituent of what is here being defined as specimenhood – a subjectivity that is established through medico-science’s methods of interrogation, surveillance, categorization and display. It is ‘through the body’ of this subject, the patient, who is performed as a specimen, that the disciplinary gaze is made visible, where it is usually invisible (Heyes 2007: 30). By implication, everyone is subject to this medical gaze and to occupying the position of specimen, as they encounter medicine to varying degrees and durations.

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Different experiences of the medical encounter are worthy of critical attention, as the relationship concerns a position of power that can affect a highly unequal situation. We have already noted, for instance, that women may be treated inequitably in medical terms and in ways that can impact on their health, access to care and, ultimately, their mortality. This means that specimenhood may be felt more acutely by some than others; a case in point is that of disability. As argued by Michael Chemers in his work on the American freak show (2008), disability scholars and activists have long been fighting against the pathologization of disability, a legacy of medicine’s turn to abnormality in constructing ideas about the normal and the healthy. Those with impairments, therefore, are often subjected to far more intrusive medical interventions than the non-disabled and can face degrading levels of display and scrutiny. With the foundation of standards of normativity, the ‘norm’ became a medical objective in the approach to patients, and disability, therefore, as something to be fixed or cured, whether or not this was desired by the individual. Impairments needed to be rectified, with medical assistance, to meet or get closer to the healthy ‘norm’, thereby establishing impairments as unwanted and pitiable conditions within social discourse (Chemers 2008: 104–5). The medical gaze has been critiqued as the ‘disabling gaze’ in these terms, effective in driving regimes of surveillance and control, and ultimately impacting on wider social views about disability (Chemers 2008: 105). In other words, specimenhood is medically constructed and in ways that can dehumanize the subject through often violent disciplinary measures and circulations of power, including that of the medical gaze. Foucault understood whole populations as being circumscribed by these mechanisms, beyond the individual patient, and located in his idea of ‘biopower’. This, he claimed, had its roots in the eighteenth century when Western societies witnessed the birth of the so-called human sciences that took the human, as a species, as its object of study. This in turn led to targeted political strategies dealing with governed subjects at the level of population, through such instruments as education, public health strategies and prisons (Foucault 2004: 75). Power became enacted through the governance of a population that included improving ‘its wealth, its longevity, and its health’ (Foucault 2004: 105). Biopower is thus ‘power over life’ and operates at the level of population and

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at the level of the individual, in order to ‘produce and control both the docile body of the individual described in terms of its utility, efficiency and intelligibility’, and ‘the species body which grounds a bio-politics of population’, focused on such things as birth rates, reproduction, mortality and life expectancy (Shildrick 1997: 46). One could view the development of medical museums and collections as reflecting and reinforcing these biopolitical shifts, from being concerned with individual bodies and pathologies, to an increasing focus on how these might inform an understanding of the human species, strengthening subjects such as epidemiology (the study of the distribution of diseases). The specimen is both a unique example and representative of a type, thereby replicating the spheres of biopower as a material technology that preserves, addresses and displays aspects of the individual and the population. In later work, such as The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–1979), Foucault considered the development of neoliberalism and how this shaped the late twentieth century in Western democracies. He identified the emergence of ‘homo œconomicus’, who is ‘an entrepreneur of himself’, autonomous individuals who take responsibility for themselves as owners of their ‘own capital’ (Foucault 2010: 226). This means that each individual has choice over his decisions and lives, a facet of neoliberal societies that changes the operation of power and control to forms of ‘identification and allegiance rather than overt coercion’ (Pitts-Taylor 2009: 161). The self becomes agentic in a social milieu that offers an increasing diversity of options and choices for self-management and care. Instead of governments operating systems of public monitoring and surveillance, the neoliberal turn means that the disciplinary gaze now belongs to the subject, who directs it at themselves. Included as part of these power structures and relations is the medical gaze, now also part of the arsenal of self-care available to the neoliberal subject. Each subject seeks to fulfil social expectations through modes of self-examination, self-monitoring and bodily regimes in relation to things like lifestyle, habits and physical embodiment. In the words of cultural theorist Margrit Shildrick: ‘[w]hat is demanded of her is that she should police her own body, and report in intricate detail its failure to meet standards of normalcy; that she should render herself, in effect, transparent’ (Shildrick 1997: 49). The specimen is able to recognize their own failures and faces multiple options

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to transform themselves, in what might conceivably be the most effective and efficient version of disciplinary practices – policing of the self (Shildrick 1997: 54–5). The self-policing suggested by Foucault and Shildrick, followed by self-confession, if the subject fails to conform to social expectations of bodily respectability, control and management, is borne out by instances in popular culture. Failure to adhere to demands on and of the body and the subsequent necessity for experts to intervene is performed regularly on mainstream television in programmes such as Supersize vs Superskinny (2008–14). In these formats, individuals present themselves to doctors and scientists as failing/failed selves in need of professional mediation. They willingly position themselves as specimens, whilst also being actively constructed as such through the documentary and reality formats developed by these programmes. Unable to reflect social norms around body weight and appearance, the subjects are also exposed as morally flawed, unable to manage themselves or gain control over their unruly bodies. Studying contemporary practices of weight loss, philosopher Cressida Heyes notes ‘the truly extraordinary degree of suffering that attaches to corporal failures that normalization has carefully called into being’ (2007: 120–1, emphasis in original). She identifies the cultivation of self-loathing that often passes under the guise of self-improvement as part of this culture, in which everybody can be deemed as defective in some way (2007: 121). Following extensive analysis of their diets, lifestyles, motivations and desires, the specimens are offered expert guidance on how to improve their situations through nutritional and behavioural options. All the measures supposedly enhance their well-being, which can be interpreted as their ability to conform in compliant and productive ways. In order to enable these changes, the specimens are often singled out and excluded from the population in some way. They are housed in new, more clinical and highly monitored environments for some or all of their ‘treatment’. They are subjected to total display, or transparency, and evaluation – their weight, their physical appearance and health, their diets, their lives – to demonstrate their inadequacies, wrong choices and failings, so that they can be appropriately disciplined, through suggestion and influence, and duly transformed. Leaving the house or clinical studio at the end of each programme, viewers witness apparently healthier, happier individuals who are more in control of themselves, their appetites and bodies.

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These cultural moments demonstrate explicitly and forcibly the agentic self-regulator of neoliberalism. The individuals presented and performed in these public spectacles are willing to undergo considerable exposure and humiliation in order to be helped towards their aspirations for normalcy and acceptance. This willingness to be displayed in these exploitative ways suggests that the weight of social expectations around bodies and appearance can be overwhelming, as subjects are encouraged to measure up against each other and to be active in trying to keep up (with the Kardashians, for instance). What is also manifest in these examples is that specimenhood falls most acutely on those with bodies that are considered to be socially inappropriate and, therefore, pathological. Such individuals are taken to perform their failure to be proper citizens through their disorderly bodies and minds; not matching up to the ideal of the modernist subject, they are staged as ‘other’ and subject to oppressive medicalized regimes. Whilst the disciplinary gaze has, arguably, been dispersed amongst individuals and across populations, it is noticeable that, as evidenced by these mainstream cultural products, the objectifying and evaluating role of medicine still retains its power. The monitoring of the self is enabled, developed and strengthened by official circuits of governmentality that include the expertise and guidance of medical professionals. It is thus evident that Foucault’s work and legacy continue to have a significant bearing on how medicine, illness and health can be analysed in the twenty-first century. As medicine changes through computing technologies, enhanced data and statistical analysis and the development of biomedicine (meaning the application of biological concepts to clinical practice), so society is increasingly biomedicalized as a whole. This is the shift that Foucault identified, towards health and illness ‘becoming individual moral responsibilities’ through the self-monitoring discussed, the assessment of risk and the ‘consumption of appropriate self-help/ biomedical goods and services’ (Clarke et al. 2003: 162). Sociologist Nikolas Rose calls this ‘the politics of life itself’, as capitalist enterprise provides growing capacities to manipulate, modify and manage human and non-human life (Rose 2007: 3). This has been enabled by what has been termed ‘technomedicine’, by which Rose means the evermore complex diagnostic and therapeutic tools at our disposal, and the requirement for evidence-based medical practice and decision making. Finally, this also incorporates the

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commodification of health and the flourishing arena of bio-capital, where the molecular body has been ‘opened up  … for technical innovation, economic exploitation, and for highly competitive forms of bioeconomics’ (Rose 2007: 11). Foucault’s neoliberal entrepreneur now perceives themselves as capital, worth investing in and capable of being commercialized, even at the cellular and molecular level. In relation to arguments about property rights in the body and cases such as those of Henrietta Lacks, it is easier to see why the body of biomedicine has become the subject of debate and contestation when it comes to who has rights over it and who can effectively make money from it. If we are entrepreneurs of ourselves and our biology, we might want or even need a stake in its financial worth and to position ourselves, legally, ontologically and philosophically, as owners of our biological materials. The efficacy of capitalism and neoliberalism in these contexts, which have rendered biology as financially valuable and commodifiable, drives an inevitable and insatiable need for new products and new markets. New illnesses and susceptibilities need identifying, naming and made treatable by innovative drugs and therapies, state-of-the art personalized self-monitoring equipment needs constant upgrading and new options for individual transformation are marketized. Freed from a limiting dependence on ideas of the abnormal or pathological, ‘biomedicine constantly extends the possibilities of bodily and self-transformation’ and so the ‘good biomedical citizen is never done engaging with the bodyself’ (Pitts-Taylor 2009: 164). It is a self-perpetuating and endlessly proliferating logic that means that the self-policing is open-ended, and the project of the self is never fully accomplished. Whilst this shift to markets and economies has raised difficulties in legal terms around biological material and its ownership, it has also been shadowed by the emergence of bioethical frameworks that seek to analyse and moderate their effects. Ideas of human rights, the dignity of the individual and protection from exploitation have become important discursive structures that attempt to shield the subject from unwanted and abusive treatment, as already noted, and writ large in principles such as informed consent and beneficence (the moral imperative to act in the best interests of the patient). Critics have also argued that the quest for endless selfrenewal under extensive and extending regimes of self-monitoring and bio-innovation has the capacity to have a deleterious impact

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on well-being as individuals are made to feel constantly inadequate, morally flawed and socially anxious. Specimenhood, as a part of postmodern subjectivity, is constituted by individuals biologically analysing and objectifying themselves, having taken on the role previously exclusively occupied by medical and other authorities. Subjects monitor their body’s performance and appearance through various medicalized interventions – surgery, drugs, diets, exercise regimes and health apps. Neoliberalism, in Foucauldian terms, means that identities are not fixed but open to endless alteration in what can appear to be an autonomous and exciting realm for the agentic self. The social expectation is for a continual performance of selfconstituted health, where the individual is in control of their own body and busy enabling it to be robust and disease-free. Lifestyle choices should be based on healthy disciplinary regimes that take care of the specimen-self, whilst techno-gadgetry is deployed to check and supervise the body at all times, awake and asleep. As specimenhood becomes an increasingly dominant feature of subjectivities and everyday life, the next chapter will consider the work of performance makers who deliberately engage with, actively resist or challenge, and endure, the medicalized disciplinary forces at work in contemporary society.

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3 Performing Resistant Specimens

The introduction suggested some of the ways of conceiving the links between the medical practice of dissection (particularly in the early modern period), the construction of anatomized corpses as specimens in those moments and performance. The resultant spectacle of the opened body as part of the processes of anatomical dissection has produced an enduring connection with theatre and performance, from the first purpose-built anatomy theatres and the public staging of dissections, to the current exhibitions of Professor Gunter von Hagens and mainstream televised surgeries, such as those depicted in the BBC documentary Dissected, described in the introduction. Based on visual economies that seek to encounter and understand bodily depth and interiority, dissection requires the body to be displayed and its hidden interiors demonstrated to an audience. These revelatory and spectacular modes of investigation are, therefore, intimately connected with the dynamics and practices of theatre, where a body can be seen, where anatomists can show their skills and knowledge, and where a spectator can be enlightened, and even entertained, by the visceral explorations and slow disaggregation of the body. Following the process of dissection, the medical specimen is subjected to the same intense visual scrutiny, separated and preserved for the purpose of optical analysis and proximal viewing. Putting a body part in a specimen pot renders it visible from every angle, encouraging an up-close encounter with its corporal materiality. Imagine, for instance, specimens in a museum and the visitors who try to get alongside the displays, pressing themselves against the glass in order to get a

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better view. When given the opportunity to hold the pot, the viewer will invariably hold it close, turn the container around and see the specimen from every approach. This mode of display seems to offer total visibility to the curious and all-powerful observer, rendering the body knowable and objectified as it enters the visual field. Such post-Enlightenment epistemological structuring of vision confirmed material phenomena as eminently graspable, both intellectually and visually, and included the specimen body within its domain of constant exposure and revelation. What is also unveiled, however, is the implicit hierarchy at work between the viewer who can indulge in a glut of looking, and the viewed, whether an organ in a pot or a patient in a clinic, who is the object of this intense gaze. As Foucault argued, there is a ‘tacit form of violence’ in this dynamic of looking in order to create knowledge, particularly as it often renders the object/patient as the silent subject (Foucault 1973: 84). In the interplay of knowledge acquisition and curiosity, there also resides the worrying possibility of titillation and voyeurism. Where medico-scientific staring is authorized on the passive body it can easily slip towards a kind of pornography of pathology that is intrusive, insensitive and highly oppressive. Not only can the medical gaze be degrading, but the anatomizing process is itself caught up in circuits of violence and power. The specimen is brought into being through processes of forceful separation that partition and fragment the body and that allow different forms of penetration to occur – physical, visual and analytical. The cut of the body on the dissecting table that enables the detachment of specific organs and tissues is easy to imagine here, with the surgical incisions and gradual release of parts. The body is slowly emptied and disaggregated in a methodical deconstruction that is violently precise and measured. Each specimen is detached and isolated from the original body. But what of the construction of specimens in popular culture? Can separation and detachment be identified in these examples too? The introductory title sequence from series seven of the British television series Supersize vs Superskinny (broadcast in 2014) immediately incorporates a version of separation, surveillance and evaluation that establishes the participants as specimens within the programme’s narrative and optics.1 Male and female bodies are filmed in fractured close-ups as they are positioned as statuesque anatomical bodies; the camera journeys over near-naked flesh,

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lingering on unwelcome physical traits, such as body fat and distended stomachs. The specimens look as though they are rotating on invisible pedestals as the camera tracks around them to provide all-embracing specimen views – the entire 360-degree vista of unflinching visibility. These ‘super’ specimens are decontextualized in their separation from the everyday, located in a clinically bright, white space, where the flesh becomes the focus of attention and a defined background is expunged from the image. The audience is rapidly made to identify these bodies as problematic by a mixture of voiceover and graphics that detail the forthcoming content of the episode, indicating the unhealthy eating habits of its two central participants, one super-size and one super-skinny, by projecting various statistics onto the specimen bodies that convey a message of a population facing a barrage of dietary disorders and, therefore, inevitable decline. Here the tension between the specimen being of the everyday, but also extra-ordinary and noteworthy, is exposed and manipulated for the viewer. The specimen is at once ‘one of us’, the person on the street, and marked as radically different through an emphasis on wayward pathology that initiates their detachment from their usual milieu – they are extreme versions of the quotidian, as ‘super’ individuals at either end of a dietary spectrum. Establishing a relation with the viewer is key to the success of these programmes, drawing them in and encouraging them to make comparisons between the screened specimen and their own body on the sofa. There is a back and forth between viewer and specimen that should either apparently encourage the audience to seek similar help or take similar action, or the programme engages spectatorial pleasure (and it is surely more of this than the former) that comes from being able to engage in the ‘spectacle of certainty’, as disability scholar Petra Kuppers defines it (2003: 35). In watching these exemplar bodies, the spectator may feel pleasure in realizing that ‘one’s position on the far side of the [screen] is assured’ (2003: 35). Comfort comes from establishing a relation that is constructed through difference, rather than sameness. Each participant in the show is analysed separately, and their own nutritional fault lines revealed. What, where, when and why they eat their specific diets are all disclosed alongside expert evaluations that highlight their deviation from medical norms and expectations. The health of the nation is channelled through these representative specimen bodies that are simultaneously excluded

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from the public realm, through access to the clinic, and thoroughly incorporated into it, through their everydayness. Salvation is on hand from the presence of medical professionals and researchers in the mix, who are going to act as guides and experts on the journey towards normativity. The specimens are exposed and located within a clinical milieu, whilst the doctors are filmed in ordinary situations, going about their work on behalf of their patients – seeking cures and solutions that will induce recovery. At the end of the title sequence, the participants, who are also contestants, parade in their flesh-coloured underwear into an empty but elegant, Regency-style studio, with muted walls, wooden floor and large windows. The sense of the clinic is continued within this space, where the specimens are highly visible and stand in a semi-circle around the formally introduced Dr Christian Jessen, with weighing scales situated prominently in their midst. The transition from the everyday to a specimen is in evidence, as all the accoutrements of life have emphatically been stripped away in front of the man of medicine and the viewer. Uncovered, vulnerable and already undergoing intense scrutiny that has found these subjects wanting, Foucault’s tacit violence is at work and under erasure (and all within the first two minutes of the episode). The notion of erasure emerges from Petra Kuppers’ work on anatomy exhibitions, where she describes anatomy as a violent vision machine, voraciously exposing the disarray of the interior of the body to view, penetrating ever further, whilst promising enhanced knowledge of ourselves (Kuppers 2004: 133). It is partly this epistemological and ontological assurance that puts this ferocious act ‘under erasure’, by framing it as significant to progress and scientific advancement. Certainly, the exploitative nature of much mainstream reality diet and makeover television is presented as necessary in its alleged bid to improve the participant’s and thereby the nation’s health and happiness. Any shame, degradation and humiliation attached to the process are under constant erasure through a discourse of education, help and support – it is in our best interests to observe, analyse and act to normalize such unruly specimen bodies, no matter how it makes them or us feel along the way. What is under erasure, however, in Kuppers’ view, is always ‘in process, incomplete’, and liable to recalcitrant re-appearance (Kuppers 2004: 133). In the anatomy exhibits of her study, this partiality is revealed by the fact that the

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bodies have histories and ‘show traces of their treatment’ (Kuppers 2004: 133). Think back momentarily to the specimen of the infant’s arm in the introduction, for example, where a lacy sleeve and cap aspire to cover up the site/sight of the amputation and prettify the wound. Despite the anatomist’s best attempts to conceal his violent work, it haunts the specimen in the jar, so obviously severed and detached from the child’s body. Medical specimens, more generally, often reveal the marks of incision or features of the subject remain in patches of skin, hair, eyelashes and nails that re-humanize them. Such personal details can radically disrupt the objectifying gaze by sharply reminding the viewer of a person and a life cut apart. In order to control the always incomplete process of erasure at work in specimenhood, various tactics and mechanisms are deployed, such as the embroidered sleeve or the discourse of consent established around the Body Worlds plastinates, discussed in Chapter 1. In the televisual example, the erasure is sustained through the journey from ‘before’ to ‘after’ treatment that never fails to deliver an improved self. Contestants leave the so-called feeding clinic healthier and happier versions of themselves, transformed through diet, self-awareness, self-control and a makeover at the end of the show. Dr Christian is at pains to celebrate their success and to emphasize how they have become more socially productive and effective in the process – they are better wives, mothers, sons, fathers and so on, as a result of their labour on and with their own bodies. Whilst there are often moments along the way where participants reveal the stress they are under, any insights into the structural violence at work in the medicalization of their bodies are tightly controlled – put under erasure – by the drive towards normalization. As part of the process, of what is here being called specimenhood, the essential elements of detachment and erasure are also found in the ethnographic object in the museum. In her study of how objects perform within museum contexts, performance studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett considers the displayed artefact as demonstrating ‘an art of excision’ in its separation from its originating context (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 18). The curator or collector must be surgical in deciding where to make the dividing cut, on choosing what to take into the museum and what remains behind. In other words, detachment of the specimen ‘refers not only to the physical act of producing fragments but also to the detached

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attitude that makes the fragmentation and its appreciation possible’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 18). This idea of detachment aligns with Foucault’s medical gaze and its objectifying operations, where thought and action maintain an analytical distance from the patient and their body. Such distance is validated by an insistence on medicoscience as an unbiased, evidence-based enquiry that depends upon objectivity in order to deliver its diagnostic truths and treatments. The doctor in Supersize vs Superskinny enacts this mode through visual signifiers, including occupying isolated and isolating pseudoclinical spaces where he reads charts and documents, where the participants must meet him, and which replicates the encounter of the medical consultation, with a desk separating doctor and patient. Specimenhood, as a contemporary aspect of subjectivity, is thus partly constituted by intense modes of surveillance, erasure and acts of severance. These arguments construct specimenhood as an extremely vulnerable and precarious subject position that is dependent upon exploitative power relations and intrusive scopic regimes to be maintained. In her work on diet groups, as such an example, Cressida Heyes expresses concern about the oftcited ‘image of the beaten down, obsessive, and oppressed dieter as the irrefutably docile body’, particularly prevalent in feminist critiques of weight-loss schemes and those who subscribe to them (Heyes 2007: 85). Whilst remaining critically alive to these issues of disciplinary control, she nonetheless identifies the ‘enabling’ aspects of these practices that might be productive for feminist activism elsewhere. These include thinking about the positives of becoming self-aware in relation to ‘self-destructive behaviors’ and the mobilization of groups of women into empathetic and supportive communities (Heyes 2007: 88). Adapting Heyes’ ability to locate positive and enabling tactics in these moments, what other ways are there of thinking about and performing specimens, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding? How might these violent and violating tendencies be counteracted, advancing a more ethical approach to the specimen? What might an ethics of care look like in relation to the display of pathologized bodies? And most importantly, how might performance operate as a vehicle to explore, expose and resist some of the painful positions of specimenhood? These questions are at the centre of the rest of this chapter, as three performance examples are explored in relation to the key integral attributes of specimenhood: surveillance, erasure and detachment.

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Re-directing the medical gaze: Clod Ensemble’s An Anatomie in Four Quarters The London-based theatre company Clod Ensemble, directed by Suzy Willson and Paul Clarke, is focused on investigating the links between medicine and performance.Their ongoing project Performing Medicine has several facets that enable this work, including a programme of elective study for undergraduate medical students, which facilitates sessions with various artists and which aims to enhance the trainee physician’s understanding of the experience of being a patient within a medical environment. Performance practitioners, such as Brian Lobel and Peggy Shaw, engage the students in sessions focused on issues around patient subjectivity, embodied experience, personal narratives and identity politics within the medical context. In 2011, Clod Ensemble staged their performance work, An Anatomie in Four Quarters2 at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London (hereafter referred to as An Anatomie), as part of a series of events titled ‘Anatomy Season’, inspired by the iconography of anatomy and dissection, from flayed sculptures to Rembrandt’s painting of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr  Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and x-ray images. Willson describes the piece as a ‘visual poem concerned with human beings’ insatiable desire to get closer to things’, reiterating an understanding that theatre and anatomical practices create certain kinds of specimens through similar visual dynamics (Willson 2016: 151). If anatomy is the foundation of specimen creation, as is being proposed here, then the performance explores the role of representation, ideology and the position of the spectator in this process. Given that anatomy is a kind of ‘vision machine’ equivalent to the theatre, this analysis will concentrate on the dynamics of visuality and spectatorship as they constitute specimenhood (Kuppers 2004: 133). Through Clod Ensemble’s piece, the company reveals and capitalizes on connections between anatomy and performance, and how, as vision machines, both anatomy and theatre use similar tactics and stumble on equivalent problematics. If anatomy and theatre are kinds of ‘vision machines’, then an immediate question is invoked in relation to the potential differences in looking at a specimen body within the medical context of anatomy and the artistic context of a performance. If it is presumed that there are categorical distinctions between art and science, then it would

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follow that their engagement with bodies is going to be necessarily distinctive. As an early proponent of empirical research, Andreas Vesalius laid the ground for anatomy to be a science based in objectivity and analysis, and, importantly, one that was consistently mediated through representational strategies; not only did he dissect the body, but he also recorded his findings in illustrations and text. Knowledge of the body has long been organized through representations and active demonstrations of anatomization. It is here though that the proposed objectivity of dissection and autopsia, in seeking the truth directly from the specimen cadaver, is undercut by the mediating effects of representational strategies (as already identified in Chapter 1). Willson and Clarke determined to examine the operations of ‘desire’ in these manifestations, as no representation is neutral or without subjective intent, and they used that as an impetus to ask what it means to get close to something, particularly an anatomized or anatomical body: ‘In making this piece we became interested in … how the act of looking affects what we are looking at and the risks of becoming stranded in one point of view’ (Clod Ensemble 2011). At first glance, then, these two methodologies seem incongruous and only serve to reinforce the presumed differences between art and science, particularly those of objectivity and subjectivity. Vesalius was interested in the revelation of ‘truths’ about the body, whilst Clod Ensemble was concerned with the different perspectives and ideologies at work in such attempts. Both theatre and dissection extend an offer to view; both display bodies for scrutiny and analysis; both offer different visual perspectives to their spectators; and neither form of view is unmediated or direct. In fact, both deal in forms of ideological looking that are partial and contingent, dependent on context, histories and standpoint (cultural, social, political and so on), and the act of looking that is itself co-constitutive. Clod Ensemble’s work explored these intertwinings in An Anatomie through offering a range of views of the dancing body that were based on medical and anatomical images, transforming the dancers into specimens, intent on demonstrating their own anatomies or occupying the position of anatomized figures in art, such as the écorché (a figure whose skin has been removed to show the muscles underneath) of the Dying Gaul by William Linnell (1840). The piece also experimented with offering different perspectives to the audience, moving the

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audience through the theatre itself to get closer to the stage but also presenting the dancers in near and far positions. Dancers performed in unusually close-up encounters with the audience, in the seating areas and with them on the stage in the final section, and in more distant but familiar performance relations between stage and audience. Stage lighting was also used to affect the revelation of bodies, partially or wholly, exploring the desire to see fully and completely in theatrical and anatomical vision machines. These positions and views also reflected on aspects of dance and everyday life, where bodies are subjected to intense viewing and forms of fragmentation. For instance, dancers were positioned briefly on a lighting gantry, high above the auditorium, where only their legs and feet were visible. En pointe, the dancers performed ballet sequences reminiscent of exercises at the barre, used to train the dancer at the start of each classical class. Suggesting that dance itself contains elements of dissective partitioning, connections were drawn between the anatomical models in medical texts and those same understandings as providing the basis for dance technique and teaching. Dance, theatre and anatomy share predilections for dissolving bodies into parts, revealing some whilst hiding or obscuring others, and offering different aspects to sight; the dancing body is often an anatomized specimen. As specimens are subject to intense scrutiny, these dancing versions were presented to the audience at various spatial intervals, so that tensions between what could and could not be seen were evoked. I have written elsewhere about the pathological view occupied by anatomical practice, drawing on the work of art historian James Elkins.3 He claims that ‘myopic positions are pathological or medical, and are beyond the bounds of common human intercourse’ (Elkins 1999: 17). In terms of the artwork, the painting, Elkins describes such spectatorial positioning as ‘improper’, particularly when works have normative and authorized viewing points, a kind of ‘middle range’ (Elkins 1999: 16–17). Medicine, specifically in relation to the specimen, be it a dissected spleen or cells on a microscope slide, encourages an intensely myopic view that seeks to look closely and in minute detail, simultaneously further fragmenting and dehumanizing the subject. The body disappears from view as the look zooms in on ever finer structures and facets. This is clearly the logic of the wet specimen in its preservation jar; it is decontextualized, floating free from its original body and

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subject to an alleged transparency in its spectacle of display. It can be seen in the opening credits of Supersize vs Superskinny, where the participants are subjected to intrusive close-ups of their flesh, where part is substituted for whole; the view of the specimen is both excessive and incomplete. The myopic view is harder to conjure in traditional proscenium arch spaces such as Sadler’s Wells, where boundaries between spectator and performer are more tacitly enforced and spectators are prohibited from getting too close to the bodies on stage.4 An Anatomie literalized this movement from normative theatrical viewing positions to myopic ones by using its four structural sections to move the audience of two hundred from the upper circle, to the dress circle, the stalls, and finally onto the stage in a gradual descent towards proximity and a shared intimacy with the dancers. This movement contained two other important features, the first of which was the anatomization of the theatre space itself. Travelling down through the theatre required the audience to be guided through usually hidden backstage areas and corridors, thereby permitting an encounter with the interior body of the theatre’s architecture. In a dissective manoeuvre, the audience traversed inner sanctums and vessels, beyond what came to seem like the empty belly or heart of the venue – the auditorium. The whole site was gradually transformed into a metaphor of the interior of the body, as the stage was also slowly anatomized, from the lifting of the plush red curtain at the start to the flying of the curtains on stage to reveal the skeleton of the building in the third section. This was a ‘lo and behold’ moment, imperative to revelatory stages in anatomizing and in theatre practice. In the last section, with the audience on stage, the lighting bars were lowered onto the stage, as though the spectators were being scrutinized by invisible, omnipotent observers, put under the spotlight in uncomfortable and strange ways. In the final moments, the audience was directed to look out at the auditorium, looking at the backs of the dancers as they took faux curtain calls at the front of the stage, to a nowdeserted viewing space. This turned the piece inside out; the seats of the auditorium, red and plump, looked like fleshy insides, whilst strings of light imitated veins or the nerves of the space. On the inside of the performance and the space, the audience were given a performer’s perspective on what it looked like to be on the stage, looking out at the void of the venue (see Figure 3). Finally, the

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FIGURE 3  An Anatomie in Four Quarters by Clod Ensemble, 2011.

small audience was released from the body, flushed out onto the street through a stage door. These last moments of An Anatomie reinforced the second important feature of the audience’s journey from upper circle to the stage, that from subject to object. At the start, the audience were comfortably ensconced in the upper circle and offered a distant, bird’s eye view of the stage. The specimen bodies dancing below seemed detached and separate, performing within the parameters of the proscenium arch that framed and divided the bodies in the vision machine. This view changed as the audience made their descent through the space and by the third part, in the stalls, the dancers were more deliberately looking at the audience, sharing gazes across the space. The detached and analytical view permitted from afar was interrupted by direct acknowledgement of the audience as participants in an exchange of looks. The subtle shift for the audience was moving from subject to object; specimen bodies were no longer ‘over there’, but everyone in the space was now available to be looked at, and increasingly so when the audience joined the dancers on the stage. Bodies intermingled and related to each other in new ways that collapsed distinctions and offered flickering positions of subject and objecthood.

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This relational aspect of specimens is a key feature of their ontology and how they affect epistemological insights, offering provocative links between specimenhood and theatricality, as both concepts rely on spectatorial engagements. Alberti argues that specimen collections in medical museums are ‘complex sets of relations comprising multiple traces, multi-authored materials, that are actively invented and re-invented’ (Alberti 2011: 8). The creation of meaning and significance resides in the arrangement of objects and how their materiality interacts, between themselves or in relation to audiences, curators, technicians and medics, for instance. Social anthropologist Elizabeth Hallam extends this sense of associative connection in the anatomical collection and museum to address and include their other contents – such as the customary accompanying presentation of images, text and non-biological objects, such as instruments and models – articulating these relations as being ‘intermedial’ (Hallam 2016: 17). The specimen makes sense because of its position alongside other objects and media, where such relations inform, influence, re-configure and revise their interpretation and meanings. Such intermediality was core to the construction of An Anatomie, drawing as it did on the histories and iconography of anatomical practice. These were referenced in the poses and choreographies of the dancers and musicians, placing them within the frames of representation that have constructed the anatomical vision machine through time. Bodies demonstrated archetypal specimen positions and were also being demonstrated and tested in the space. Pulled, pushed, put under tension, measured, isolated and gathered, the dancers, as well as the musicians, their instruments and various stage technologies, were presented as anatomized architectures, with underlying structural components and their own kinds of physiologies. The drumkit on stage took on the appearance of an exoskeleton, lighting stands looked like bony frames without flesh, whilst early x-ray images projected onto the cyclorama revealed what could not be seen. Bodies, organic and non-organic, human and non-human, referred to each other and included the audience as they drew nearer and were incorporated into the final section of the piece on stage. The inter-relationality forged by the end of An Anatomie removed the sense of separation between the dancers as specimens on stage and the audience as objectifying viewers. As bodies got closer to each other, sharing the same space at the heart of the theatrical vision

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machine, everyone was subjected to an equivalent force of surveillance from the imaginary spectator in the auditorium – the place of viewing par excellence. Everyone was now liable to occupy the position of specimen, as bodies intermingled and viewing positions became fluid and alternating. With the audience on stage, who was the spectator and who was the spectated? The work implicated specimenhood in a complex dynamic involving co-constituting visuality, whilst also recognizing the impossibility of delivering full transparency and revelation. An Anatomie created a potentially destabilizing moment of subjectivity; it felt thrilling and awkward to find oneself on the stage at Sadler’s Wells, like unprepared performers suddenly thrust into the spotlight, with no clue about expectations or the script. It induced a sense of the anxiety of specimenhood identified by Gladstone and Berio (referred to in Chapter 1), where becoming the object is stressful but returning the gaze – to the dancers and to the empty auditorium – might also be a moment of exhilarating resistance and recuperation. There was no opportunity to completely own this moment, or to become a fully agentic subject on the stage, but the potential was exposed in a light and playful manner. In creating an environment where subject and object, distance and proximity, and viewer and viewed were made unstable and shifting, specimenhood was constructed as a malleable subjectivity, at once conditional on surveillance, power relations and disciplinary practices, and also mutually dependent on others and capable of being re-framed and re-appropriated as a site of agency. Salvaging agency in the face of overwhelming mechanisms of specimenhood will be examined in the next section on Mat Fraser’s work.

Highlighting erasure: Mat Fraser’s Cabinet of Curiosities Live artist, musician and disability activist Mat Fraser’s 2014 project Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability Was Kept in a Box was initiated by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester and produced in collaboration with the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and the Science Museum, London. The work toured several medical museum venues in the UK as

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a deliberate intervention into the spaces of specimen collections, key epistemological sites where perceptions of disability have been actively constructed and displayed since the nineteenth century. If, as Foucault claims, nineteenth-century medicine was established on the bedrock of an opposition between health and abnormality, that dichotomy was clearly visible in the emerging medical museums in the 1800s. Alberti asserts that such institutions were ‘crucial sites for this material construction’ of deviance and pathology, particularly during the Victorian era (Alberti 2011: 10). Medical museums were established and developed to house the rapidly expanding collections of, amongst other things, skeletal remains and wet specimens of preserved bodies and parts from all round the world. Collectors and scientists travelled the colonies of the British Empire to discover and retrieve anything considered to be unusual and that would help to underpin research into such things as race, criminality and heredity (all dominant preoccupations of the time).5 Inevitably, any subject or specimen that deviated from the norm was highly prized by collectors and indeed the public, and the term ‘freak’ entered common parlance: ‘Freak was applied as a general term that referred to nontheatrical exhibits such as foetuses in jars as well as exotic or deformed animals’ (Chemers 2008: 6, emphasis in original). Singular specimens of normative structures would suffice in the museum but, as ‘deviance is limitless’ in pathology, so institutions became full of preserved anomalies – the pathological, the differently abled and extraordinary bodies (Alberti 2011: 6). At the same time, the performance of difference was also made visible through living specimens who were displayed collectively for paying publics, such was the popular interest in looking at the extraordinary body.6 This was the historical and cultural moment when ‘freak became an odious way of referring to humans with disabilities’ (Chemers 2008: 6). Fraser’s performance work has previously explored the ‘freak show’7 and its staging of the disabled body through reclamation of its devices. In re-occupying the position of the freak performer, Fraser has revealed and resisted the freak show’s subjugating and objectifying gaze by presenting his own agency in these moments and reflecting that medicalizing gaze back onto the spectator. By activating its contrivances and power relations, he dismantles the freak show through humour that reframes and uncovers its operations.

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For Cabinet of Curiosities, Fraser’s research took him into the archives and stores of august medical organizations to explore constructions of disability through their objects, images and histories that he then used to develop a ninety-minute performance lecture.8 This combined elements of a conventional lecture with more deliberate performance modes, such as poetry, heavy metal rap, song and dance, to expose how medical and scientific museums have documented and represented disability historically. Inserting himself into the centre of the medical establishment, Fraser occupied the position of expert and utilized the tools of rhetoric, performance and presentation in order to disrupt and expose the dominant, medicalized narratives of disability. As institutions with histories of displaying and objectifying disability in order to shore up ideas of normality, such moments of intervention are significant, even now, as museums continue to come to terms with their legacies of stigmatization of minority groups. In her review of the piece for the Guardian newspaper, Lyn Gardner captured this import when she acknowledged that ‘[e]ven the presence of Mat on stage in the very heart of this citadel of the medical profession says a great deal’ (Gardner 2014). Fraser noted during the lecture that much of this medicalized and medicalizing history involves the explicit and violent erasure of the subject and their personal narratives from the archive of specimens. The focus in the museum is, instead, reduced to symptoms or impairments that aroused the curiosity and scrutiny of the medical establishment. Near the beginning of the piece, Fraser spoke some of the labels that he found attached to the images and artefacts that he encountered, such as ‘conjoined twins’, ‘unknown Spaniard’ and ‘undesirable mental defectives’. In giving voice to these abbreviated tags, he skewered this extreme form of medicalization and exposed a shocking disinterest in the actuality of the lives of those recorded. The structural act of effacement in these collections, where individuals and the personal are absented, was foregrounded by Fraser in a simple gesture of speaking the archive against a projection of the relevant image or object. This became a movement towards re-humanizing those who have been preserved by Fraser’s mediating presence between text and accompanying image. His warmth and care for these subjects meant that their re-presentation, although unaltered, was framed differently. The poignancy of each image jarred with the abrupt, objectifying labels that reveal all

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too little that was personal and everything that was systemically oppressive about these practices. This form of personal erasure is an act of detachment required for the creation of the specimen. Severed from everyday histories, contexts and relations, the specimen is left free floating in the collection, a subject transformed into an object. In pinpointing disabled people’s treatment as ‘specimens’ in these contexts, Fraser affectingly referred to his own experience of being born with phocomelia, as a result of his mother being prescribed thalidomide during the early stages of her pregnancy in 1961. He talked about what it means to be looked at medically, to feel the weight of specimenhood in each medical encounter, at least up until the mid1990s, when approaches started to change. These consultations included doctors claiming that such medical failures could no longer happen, as though re-asserting their ‘God complexes’ (in Fraser’s view), discussing his bone structure and requesting to feel his limbs because it ‘was rare to have a living subject’ in front of them, even when the appointment was for something completely unrelated (like ‘having stitches removed from my knee’). These appeared to be attempts to ‘analytically feel difference’ in Fraser’s body, which left him thinking that he was wholly defined by his physical embodiment (Fraser 2014). The apotheosis of this erasure and detachment was encapsulated by Fraser’s inclusion of the experience of fellow ‘thalidomide person’ Terry Wiles. This material was introduced by Fraser who considered the early development of prosthetics for ‘thalidomiders’ that reflected the medical ideal of making the disabled body ‘look normal’ (Fraser 2014). Technologies were created that actually inhibited movement and even sometimes necessitated surgical interventions to ensure that the prosthetic fit was adequate – Fraser refers to these as ‘removal surgeries’. In a bid for normality, medicine further disabled bodies through restraint and deliberate impairment, erasing them physically but also emotionally and psychologically. Drawing attention to the display of these prosthetic devices in the Science Museum, London, Fraser pointed to their material presence in a display case with an accompanying absence of any personal testimony from thalidomiders who had to wear them. Personal experience is ignored in the exhibition but was reintroduced in Cabinet of Curiosities as Fraser overlaid historical medical footage of Wiles as a child in a prosthetic device with his adult spoken testimony, recorded via a Skype interview.

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The medical film is a silent study of Wiles as a small child in prosthetic devices, firstly wearing ‘rocker-ended pylons’ that attached to his hips and legs, and then with the addition of ‘gas powered arms’. He is positioned on a table, in a neutral setting, and filmed from the front and back, revealing the complexity of the straps and brace required to hold Wiles into the contraptions. The second half includes a woman – a nurse – who introduces a ball for Wiles to play with, and then plastic hoops that can be thrown over a short pole. Demonstrating his apparent newfound dexterity, Wiles clutches the objects with the prosthetic hands and then releases them, as though unsure what else to do. About thirty seconds into the footage, Wiles’ adult voice interrupts the sequence to narrate how he experienced this prothesis at the time, a combination of fear, disorientation and discomfort. He explains that he didn’t understand why he had to wear them and ‘hated them’, but when he tried to voice this he was ignored and told that it was in his best interests, even though he felt changed as a person by these ineffective and cumbersome technologies. After showing the film, Fraser claimed this moment as revolutionary in the way that disability is represented. By marrying image, object and text with personal narrative and testimony, Fraser rightly identifies a radical shift in the meaning and frame of the film. As Wiles is given the space and time to recall and explore his feelings about the prothesis, so the audience is confronted with a switch from an objectifying, silent gaze to an ethically engaged and personal insight into the medicalization of disability. Any sense of agency, desire, voice and affective responses to this way of ‘fixing’ the body from Wiles were all overlooked in the original archive material but recuperated by Fraser to retrieve the medical specimen from this ongoing, tacit violence in the museum.

Transplanted specimens: Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy’s The Body Is a Big Place The final section of the chapter will consider the specimenhood of the transplanted organ and its performative potential to provoke a consideration of the relationality and co-dependence of bodies. Both Clod Ensemble’s and Mat Fraser’s work shifted affective relations between audience and specimens by enabling the occupation of

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different perspectives on what otherwise might seem fixed and unalterable. These transformed perceptions emerge from re-framing certain medical practices and representations in a way that evidences the objectifying power of the medical gaze, that demonstrates forms of ideological looking and collecting in relation to specimens, and that reveals the points of violence and erasure in these discursive structures. Fraser talks about the ‘humanizing’ aspect of more socially engaged and ethical museum practices that he has witnessed in recent years.9 This is also an essential component of his own performance work and, indeed, of all the performance work being explored in this book; the power of performance to reflect on and reconfigure certain constructions and processes of specimenhood in contemporary society. In returning the human and the humane to the specimen, following the violence of excision, detachment and fragmentation, there is a need to re-locate the body (part) within a context that depends on an openness to others through relationality and an ethics of care. Recent philosophical and cultural studies work on organ transplantation offers an interesting way of developing ideas on the co-dependence of bodies, highlighted by the specimen organ that transits between different body interiors. This is a specimen that is excised and detached, but its fate involves a moment of exposure and crossing, before being re-attached and re-animated in a recipient body. As a visual artist, Helen Pynor explored this terrain with fellow artist Peta Clancy in an installation titled The Body Is a Big Place (2010–13). In collaboration with medical staff and transplant communities in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, they became interested in the idea of the incorporation of the other in transplant surgery and how this affected the organ recipient. Largely ignored by medical practitioners and medical literature, they paid attention to patient narratives and anecdotes that acknowledged the strangeness of this integration and its effect on notions of subjectivity. They were also provoked by the liminal status of the transplanted organ as it journeyed between these bodies and thus death as a durational process. Rather than being a precise moment in time, as medical protocol would dictate, with the ‘time of death’ recorded, Pynor articulated a profound shift in their understanding when they attended an abattoir to obtain animal tissue in the form of pig hearts for the installation.10 Here, as pigs were slaughtered

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and eviscerated in front of them, they realized that death is not a specific moment but a durational event. The installation was first presented at the Performance Space, Sydney, Australia, in 2011 and comprised a five-channel video projection of underwater scenes in a swimming pool. Using performers from the Melbourne transplant community ‘who had received, donated or stood closely by loved ones as they received or posthumously donated organs’, the film captured the group swimming to the bottom of the pool to sit on chairs, as though in a ‘meeting’ (Pynor 2016: 174). They gathered in different formations and appeared to interact with each other when they reached the chairs. Their movements between the surface and the chairs were slow and resistant; bodies turned, floated and drifted between positions. When they were not in a chair, they waited around the edge of the pool, heads above water, so that the camera, which remained underwater, only recorded their dark forms, hanging below the surface. They were partially absent presences in the background, caught in the watery reflections and distortions of light. The images cast a bluey, green glow across the gallery space, with the film and its light enveloping spectators in this eerie underworld. At the centre of the space was a retrograde Langendorff re-circulating perfusion system (an in vitro means of keeping excised animal hearts pumping for research purposes), set up to re-animate two pigs’ hearts that the artists retrieved from a local abattoir.11 The duration of the installation included this trip to get the specimens, bringing them back to the gallery and then preparing and attaching them to the perfusion machine in front of the gathered spectators (see Figure 4). As the hearts were sourced, the machine was tended by technicians, and the requisite chemicals run through it, replicating the water in the film and extending into the soundscape in the space. Once the hearts arrived, there was more activity as they were flushed and warmed before being connected to the apparatus. They were then released from their bags and revealed in their attachment to the machine, where the ‘hearts commenced spontaneous fibrillation and were defibrillated using a single pulse of 200 J at which point hearts commenced beating in sinus rhythm’ (Pynor 2016: 182). They required constant monitoring and attention over nine hours, when the machines were finally switched off and their temperature allowed to fall. One heart continued for ten hours, from the moment of attachment to

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FIGURE 4  The Body Is a Big Place (performance still), Helen Pynor and  Peta Clancy, 2011. Left: Helen Pynor; right: collaborating cardiac physiologist Professor John Headrick.

its cessation, and the other for twenty hours (Pynor 2016). When, indeed, might death be declared in this instance? It seems miraculous and strange to watch the hearts pulse into life again, ex vivo and in the gallery space, in the performance documentation. Of course, the very notions of life and death were made ambiguous by the work and by transplant technologies more generally. Outside of the body and made visible, the hearts appear deeply unfamiliar and fascinating, even mesmeric, as they re-enter their sinus rhythms from and for life. They remind the spectator that brain, organ and cellular death can all mean very different things with different temporalities. More importantly though is the way that the suspended hearts, as transplanted specimens, encourage spectators to consider the transit of tissues and organs between bodies. The cadaveric specimen is usually detached and held in stasis for display and research, but the transplanted organ is on the move, exiting one body and entering another in an intercorporeal exchange that involves multiple actants beyond the donor and recipient. A transplant depends on a network of professionals, patients, carers and supporters who come into contact with each other and the procedure in more and less visible ways. This was

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replicated in the installation as Pynor and Clancy relied on abattoir staff, transportation, technicians, gallery personnel and spectators to realize their project and created shifting clusters of participants in the process. It also manifested in the transplant community swimming in and out of focus in the film beyond the beating hearts. The choreographies of the swimmers, the artists and technicians, and the spectators in the room ebbed and flowed as different centres of attention emerge. People gather and disperse around the various specimens as affective responses to the environment, images and objects play out. Bodies affect each other and, in the transplant, become entwined and interconnected in ways that undo modernist conceptions of the self-sufficient, bounded subject. This idea of intercorporeality in relation to transplants has been developed by gender scholar Margaret Shildrick. Shildrick adopts a phenomenological approach to her research with transplant patients in an attempt to challenge medical and bioethical orthodoxies that centre on ‘the autonomous, invulnerable, sovereign subject’ (Shildrick 2008: 32). Instead, she proposes an examination of theories that address the potential of ‘flexibility and fluidity that is always open to the possibility of change’ (Shildrick 2008: 32). She is interested in recipient responses to transplants that, contrary to medical narratives, suggest complex experiences of changes in subjectivity. Because ‘the other is both integrated within – and indeed essential to – the life of the self, while remaining irreducible to that self’, the transplanted organ causes a shift in perceptions of the self, often arousing anxiety or feelings of strangeness (Shildrick 2008:  40). Pynor and Clancy’s hearts pointed to this alterity, both in the organs themselves as their surfacing in the world was so unfamiliar, and in the possibility of the pig’s hearts being transferred into other bodies (through xeno-transplantation). Shildrick’s critique also invokes a process of erasure involved in the medical practices of transplantation and that circulate around the organ as specimen. In order to shore up the fantasy that the transplant is simply a skilled act of expert organ replacement, medicine denies the personal experiences of intersubjectivity. Acknowledging the process as ‘a medically complex transfer’ negates any sense that psychic or subjective complexities might be incurred (Shildrick 2008: 40, emphasis in original). This interacts with the rhetoric of the organ being a ‘gift’ from donor to recipient (and is also invested in legal questions of property in the body, as outlined in Chapter 2), which

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puts the donor under erasure. Donors have to remain anonymous, as though the identities of donor and recipient can be kept separate and are not made contiguous in any way through the organ transfer. Donor hearts become ‘new’ hearts in an attempt to erase their origins elsewhere, in another person, in another body. The notion of the ‘donor’ in relation to the installation was ethically fraught, of course, as the pigs’ hearts were obtained through the process of slaughter that did not involve consent. They were not killed for the installation, but the artists obtained the organs during the course of standard abattoir procedures and schedules. In using animal hearts, however, the project did foreground bioethical concerns as they apply to the non-human, and such ‘interdependencies, as well as modes of exploitation, speak to the need to fully explore the ethics of all kinds of embodied relationality’ (Shildrick 2008: 35). The re-animated hearts imbricated the donors, whether human or nonhuman, as their materiality and liveliness signalled evacuated bodies elsewhere. The pigs’ hearts, made to beat again through medical technologies, invoke a range of reciprocal relations and conjoinings that also draw  attention to the global commodification of bodies, human and non-human. The animal organ, tissues and body have value as part of international biocapital, mostly related to food, but also medical research and futures concerned with xenotransplantation and genetics. On show in the gallery, these systems of use and exploitation shadow the display, rendering the mutual dependencies of bodies visible and tangible – the pigs were slaughtered for human consumption. The transplant communities’ contingencies on multiple others are also exposed in the accompanying film. Shildrick advocates transplantation as a site to think through ‘concorporeality’, where bodies are with each other, overlapping and becoming hybrid, and thus disrupting ‘the relation between self and other’ (Shildrick et al. 2017: 8). It is my contention that performance and performative modes can enact this potential towards concorporeality, through presenting resistant specimens that attend to the dominant mechanisms of surveillance, detachment and erasure used to establish forms of specimenhood.

4 Queering the Specimen

The medical specimen is physically and conceptually detached from the originary body and the context of discovery, as has been explored in Chapter 3. To this point, the specimen has been conceived of as belonging to an individual, a subject, in the first place, who is then acted upon to initiate a transformation of a body or a body part into an object, through a process of excision, amputation or removal. The act of dissection, for instance, involves the whole body being transposed into an object through anatomization, whilst a biopsy turns only a limited amount of tissue or one structure into an object. The object can be ‘the person or thing to which something is done, or on which something acts or operate’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). Of interest here is the object being the site of action or operation, which defines its objectness. This idea of action resonates with the force of the performative, an idea derived from J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts and since extended into the social realm. Austin argued that certain utterances go beyond the mere naming of things to ‘do things, effecting change’; for example, in the wedding vow of ‘I do’, where the utterance of the words brings the marriage into being, in the eyes of the witnesses, the law and the Church, depending on the context (Allain and Harvie 2014: 222). The performative depends upon an action, a doing, that brings something into being. The body of the subject, the patient, becomes specimen-object through performative medical gestures, technologies and treatment (in all senses of the word) that turn a body part or system into a site of clinical activity. The word ‘object’ has also referred to ‘something placed before or presented to the eyes or other sense’; in other words, the body-as-object is separated from the self, to be looked at and acted upon, at one remove (Oxford English Dictionary online).

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Moving to a philosophical understanding of ‘object’, it can also be ‘a thing which is external to or distinct from the apprehending mind, subject or self’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). The binary division between subject and object is underlined further, therefore, and extends to notions of subjectivity in modern usage; the subject is ‘the person or self considered as a conscious agent’, as opposed to ‘any objects external to it’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). The appearance of these concepts in science and medicine (and indeed art) adds another complexity, as the subject can also refer to the object of study. The subject might be the brain or the cardio-vascular system, as ‘the focus of activity’ and again suggesting ‘something which is or may be acted upon’. Ultimately, the subject can be the corpse ‘used for anatomical dissection’ or ‘a patient’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). In the sense of academic disciplines and, particularly, in relation to science, there needs to be an object of study, as literary scholar Elizabeth Klaver rightly determines. In medicine that ‘object is, not surprisingly, the human body, which offers itself as the field of research, the specimen under observation’ (Klaver 2004: 659). Clearly, any delineation between body-as-object and subject-as-body starts to become entangled here, as the self is embodied and not so straightforwardly separated from its bodily materiality. The complex legal and ontological issues that the specimen raises (and which are examined in Chapter 2) illustrate the tenuous nature of any attempt at differentiating the subject and object in terms of the body and the self. This is, in part, because of the Cartesian idea of the mind–body split, which, Klaver argues, Western medicine cannot take account of. Since early modern dissection, this process of objectification has been crucial, whereby it ‘views the body finally as just a body’ (Klaver 2004: 664, emphasis in original). This approach maintains and structures a strict ideological logic that the body is an object, to be acted upon by the medical profession in order to cure it. By way of contrast, UK law differentiates the body from property, suggesting that in legal terms it is conceived of as being intrinsically connected to the self and cannot, therefore, be sold, transferred or otherwise made alienable. This position is radically transformed, however, once bodily material has been excised and separated from the body. At this point, biomaterial can become legally an object, whereby it can be subject to the application of work and skill, and thus can be owned, transferred or destroyed (as

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explored in Chapter 2). But the fact that the specimen or sample was ‘once part of a person’ causes continuing disquiet and debate in legal and philosophical arenas (Wall 2015: 40). Ontologically, body and self are inseparable, so why should separated parts be considered differently; are they not still components of the person from whence they came? If there is a form of self-ownership over bodies, why should those rights be lost in those same materials once removed from the progenitor? If DNA is extracted and then utilized for profitable research, on what grounds can the originator be excluded from financial gain for the onward use of that material? As biological material becomes increasingly divisible and valuable, these questions become more pressing in the contemporary moment. In medical and legal terms, the subject/object binary belies more  complex and nuanced fluctuations, shifting across these positions. The patient and specimen are both subject and object in various contexts and frames, subject to the domain of medicine and the focus of its practices and discourse, whilst also acted upon as the object of attention. These positions do not necessarily have to be imposed from the outside, however, through particular institutional discursive formations. An individual can also distance themselves from their own bodies, viewing their flesh and materiality as object-like; the self can become ‘beingas-object’ (Klaver 2004: 662). For example, in terms of dealing with illness and disease, this can be a coping strategy, distancing self from a dysfunctional body and the threat of dissolution. But, the ubiquity of modern medicine in the West and its ‘profoundly Cartesian  … spirit’ have also helped to engender perceptions of the mind–body split in every individual, whereby the neoliberal subject, in Foucault’s terms, views their body  as an object to be constantly worked on (Leder 1990: 146). Such is the logic of contemporary biopolitics that medical tendencies to objectify the body are adopted by the individual who undertakes regimes of self-surveillance, monitoring and transformative practices, such as dieting, exercise and elective surgery, in order to discipline their own body into normative expectations. These are everyday performative actions that maintain constant processes of objectmaking in the self, and thereby support the operations of biopower and biocapital. All of this opens an interesting gap between subject and its separated part(s), whether literally or conceptually, so that the

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specimen/patient/neoliberal subject is transformed into an object, a material artefact for evaluating, manipulating and adjusting. Turning briefly to the site of anatomization, theatre scholar Maaike Bleeker notes that dissection ‘turns the body into a mute corporeal object, separated from and opposed to the Cartesian disembodied eye/I as the site of subjectivity, thought and knowledge’ (2008: 148). The enforced separation articulated here has a distancing effect that enables the specimen, the being-as-object, to be objectified and spectacularized. In medicine, the body ‘is seen as the intextuated object of science (and not as a soul, subject, or person)’ (Klaver 2004: 664). There are multiple ways that medical discourse and practice enact this detachment, for instance, through describing and thus treating pathologized body parts as ‘waste’. This terminology conjures ideas of excised corporeal material as worthless and as having no further biological use. Such an intellectual and affective lacuna between subject and dissected part must be, at least partly, the cause of recent medical scandals around stored body parts and the lack of informed consent for their removal (as discussed in Chapter 2). The objectifying force of this gap is such that some medical professionals have overlooked, forgotten or ignored the social bonds and symbolic import of bodies and their integrity, particularly after death and in relation to infants. From the beginnings of modern medicine, there has been a reliance on establishing and reinforcing the body as object, starting  in the anatomy theatres, where the body was ‘marked as the Other and encapsulated in a structure designed to neutralize its supposed threat’ (Bleeker 2008: 152). Seeking to understand the body through the intense study of its interiority, depth and intra-corporeal configurations, resulted in the containment of its complexity, pathologies and messiness. Dissection cleaned up the body-as-object even as it dismantled it, through naming, categorizing, dividing and understanding its constituent parts. The idea of the modern subject as an autonomous, sovereign body, bounded by skin and independently functional was simultaneously bolstered. Philosophical approaches to the body and self from the twentieth century onwards have often sought to reconfigure and problematize these ideas, though. For instance, Julia Kristeva’s seminal work on the ‘abject’ indicates that attempts to control and contain the body are flawed, even as we look to eradicate the risk posed by the visceral, messy body. She argues that the abject – the fluids of the body, for example – do

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not ‘respect borders, positions or rules’, but instead the abject is always ‘in-between’ and encroaching on the self (Kristeva 1982: 4). There is an attempt to point towards a fissure between self and the body’s abject ejections, such as pus and blood. This is highlighted in the epitome of abjection in Kristeva’s work, which is the corpse and other ‘refuse’, which ‘show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (Kristeva 1982: 3, emphasis in original). Waste bodily material and the dead body have to be psychically displaced so that the fantasy of subjective wholeness can be maintained, but Kristeva recognized that the abject is never fully detached, it is that ‘from which one does not part’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). The interval between subject and object in the form of pathologized and abjected tissue and fluids – the specimen – is tenuous and liable to collapse at any time. The shift in Kristeva’s work is to a psychoanalytical understanding of the self that is itself divided between the conscious and the unconscious, whilst also shoring itself up against the psychic incursions of the Other. Phenomenology has been very influential as a philosophical means of challenging Cartesian ideas of the mind–body split. Maurice Merleau-Ponty explored the body as ‘never just as an object in the world but that very medium whereby our world comes into being’ (Leder 1990: 5). He was concerned with the phenomenological experience of being a living and perceiving ‘being-in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: xiv). The lived body, as such, defies easy categorization into either subject or object because it is constantly circumscribed by its actions, interactions and relations with external objects, through which it defines itself: In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can … be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being ‘completely constituted’, is that it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and touches. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 105) He situates this subject/object ambiguity in the ability of the embodied self to provide ‘double sensations’, such as that felt when ‘I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together … but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of “touching” and “being touched”’ (MerleauPonty 2002: 106). As an individual’s hands make contact with

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each other, they become involved in an intertwining of subject and object, perceiving and perceived, touching and touched. This sense of touching and being touched cannot be perceived simultaneously but shifts alternately from one to the other and back again. A fusion is never achieved between these intertwinings; they remain mutually exclusive realms within perception. The lived body, capable of seeing and touching, implicitly contains the possibility of being seen and touched by another body in a reversibility of material encounter within this formulation. Linking Kristeva’s ideas on abjection with a phenomenological understanding of the body, Margrit Shildrick has analysed the anxiety-inducing extraordinary body of the disabled person and, by extension, the sick individual. Such a body is feared because of its potential to pervade the ‘normative subject’ through ‘engulfment and contamination’ (Shildrick 2009: 22). Able to ‘undermine any belief in the stability and consistency of bodies in general’, disabled and ill bodies provoke acute anxiety by reminding the subject of their own precarious status and intrinsic embodied vulnerability (Shildrick 2009: 20). Shildrick argues that the modernist idea of the autonomous subject requires constant delineation between self and other, and maintenance of personal borders, even as phenomenology suggests an ontological interdependence of self and other in embodied experience. Buttressing a sense of exclusive independence requires the expulsion or rejection of everything that might threaten the self. Returning to the idea of the fissure between subject and object, Shildrick notes that given ‘that no interaction is entirely without risk to our fragile sense of self, the relations between self and other operate largely within a scopic economy that privileges the spacing – the interval – of separation’ (Shildrick 2009: 22). This separation between the self and the other in the scopic field in relation to the specimen was considered in the previous chapter. This next section will be concerned with other ways of thinking, exposing and exploring the cleft between subject and object that can speak back to medical practices of objectifying and spectacularizing various embodied corporealities. Can the fissure between subject and object be highlighted and collapsed through performative means and, if so, to what political ends? The artists included for analysis in this chapter engage with the performance of specimenhood as a means of exploring their queer relations with medicine. If, according

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to Foucault, modern medicine is premised on ideas of normativity, founded via comparisons with the abnormal and the pathological, then queer identities risk destabilizing those constructions and raising provocative questions: ‘After all, the normative body, with its singular gender, race and sexual identification, is established only through the active expulsion of embodiments, perceptions, and identifications that exceed narrative and political unity’ (Hannabach in Shildrick 2009: 43). The case studies deployed here counteract this ‘expulsion’, this forcible insertion of the interval between the body and subjectivity, between self and other, through strategic subversions that are by turns political and playful. In different ways they each re-imagine and reclaim their specimenhood from dominant, medicalized discursive structures.

The poetics of queer specimenhood: Peggy Shaw’s MUST: The Inside Story Queer theatre activist, performer and writer Peggy Shaw created MUST: The Inside Story in collaboration with Clod Ensemble (whose work was studied in Chapter 3) in 2008. As a founder member of Split Britches, with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin, and of the WOW Café Theatre, Shaw has had a profound influence on feminist and lesbian theatre practice over the last four decades. Since the mid-1990s, she has produced a number of solo shows, which feminist theatre scholar Jill Dolan describes as forming ‘a body of autobiographical work intimately tied to the history of her flesh’, whilst also ‘engag[ing] in key terms in lesbian, feminist, and queer discourse’ (2011: 12). Her creative work explores and deconstructs gender identity, particularly as a self-declared butch lesbian, investigating her female masculinity by ‘always complicating the combination of genders across her body and her performances’ (2011: 18). Disrupting essentialist ideas about sex, gender and sexuality, she deliberately, and often humorously, plays with the performance of gender on stage. In Split Britches’ production of Belle Reprieve (1991), for example, which critiques Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, Shaw, cast as ‘Stanley, a butch lesbian’, tells the audience in Act Two that she ‘was born butch. I’m so queer I don’t even have to talk about it’ (Bourne

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et al. 1996: 177). Judith Butler discusses this layering of identity in drag performance, helping to illuminate the complexity of Shaw’s work in these moments: But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. (1990: 187) Butler points to ‘the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance’ when these conditional ‘dimensions’ are revealed, and normative gender constructions are destabilised (1990). Given the intersections between her creative practice, her lived and performed gender identity and queer politics, it is no surprise that Shaw has been a long-term collaborator with Clod Ensemble, as both a performer and an artist working on their Performing Medicine programme. The Performing Medicine project is committed to mutually enriching medicine and performance by bringing them into dialogue. Working in medical training environments, artists such as Shaw invite student doctors to consider the wider social and cultural contexts of their patients’ lives in order to foster a more open and inclusive approach to medical practice. Interested in how her history of being an ageing, lesbian grandmother has left its mark in and on her body, and how gender narratives are constructed in the everyday, she brings those insights to workshops with medical students, where she presents her embodied experience as a case study, or specimen for them. In this way, Shaw stages herself as both subject and object in the sessions and remains in control of both. She knowingly submits to the group as the object of their attention, a clinical example, in order to open a conversation about usually invisible and unheard patient experiences. In leading the discussion and provoking critical thinking and questions from the student doctors, Shaw retains her position as knowing subject, reflecting on and challenging their assumptions. What seems to be at stake is the emergence of her expert queer testimony in an environment where Shaw might usually be expected to be the one acted upon and talked about. Through articulating different forms of embodied experience, she counters the dominant model of the

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patient-as-object, as only a body, to signal the significance of other lived knowledges and ways of thinking the self that belong to the patient. She can thus draw attention to the social and medical stereotypes and assumptions that foster normative approaches to gender and sexuality, and therefore how other identities might be overlooked or disregarded in the medical encounter. The performance of MUST: The Inside Story engaged with some of these same issues in a more poetic and lyrical format, with Shaw intimately narrating her body and histories, and included live music  and projections that surrounded the corporeal tales and added  to their textures. Presenting herself as a specimen to the audience, detailing her insides, offering her flesh to view, she highlighted those aspects of herself that medicine cannot get a handle on, that cannot be measured or objectified and that constitute a deep sense of embodiment and a life lived, in all of its beauty and brutality. Alberti notes that when pathology specimens are displayed collectively in the museum they constitute a ‘dividual body … composed of different separated parts from different sources’. They are ‘more than composites or conglomerates, they are complex sets of relations comprising multiple traces, multi-authored materials’ (Alberti 2011: 8). What Shaw achieved in the  performance was the creation of a sense that her queer body and, by extension, all bodies are in fact collections of traces, entanglements, histories, experiences, landscapes, movements, relations and surfaces that slip away from easy categorization and that cannot be captured in an anatomical textbook. Subjectivity was presented in the show as a complex construction that includes the human and the nonhuman, the experiential, kinship, desire and loss and a host of other personal idiosyncrasies and encounters. Whilst Alberti suggests that specimens in the medical museum are ‘re-composed … as encyclopaedias of disease’, Shaw articulated her body as its own encyclopaedia of multiple sources and chronicles, revealed in the traces they have left on her, inside and out, that are indelible and essential to her current sense of self (Alberti 2011: 71). In so doing, she tested the limits of medical knowledge and asked how much medicine can ever really know or understand a person, constituted as we are through lived encounters and practices. As a personal journey through ‘the inside story’ of her life and body, Shaw began in and with the audience, whom she had ‘been waiting for’. She established the performance space as a place she

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has fallen into, which is a kind of body where the red stage curtains were ‘blood vessels’ enclosing her tale (Shaw 2011: 139). Part One began the telling of her body as a map, a landscape that is subject to time and events, that is transformed, marked and eroded by life. People, animals and objects fill Shaw’s body as she also drew on metaphors of planting, growing and cyclical actions. This was an image of a post-human body, alive to the environment, to the non-human and to ecological disaster, with ‘a giant in Mongolia’ who ‘can remove plastic from dolphins’ stomachs’ as part of her patchwork and encyclopaedic self (Shaw 2011: 140). Part Two was directed more explicitly to the audience and she claimed her interiority as visible and knowable in different ways: ‘You could guess what’s in here. / You could x-ray me. / You could touch me. / Or you could believe what I tell you’ (Shaw 2011: 142). This awareness of different epistemological and perceptual structures relating to the inside of the body presented each as partial and contingent; no single discourse or approach can produce definitive information or tell the whole story. To look at the patient as only a body and one solely defined by medical science risks overlooking a multitude of other stories that accumulate like so much sediment in the self. This was followed by a sequence of projections of microphotographs from the Wellcome Image Library that capture body interiors in extreme close-up. Shaw introduced them with an open gesture at the screen, saying ‘here I am’, before continuing with her text. This was a moment of levity, as the distance between Shaw and the screen, between subject and object, put this assertion of selfhood under question, as did the reduction of the performer to a series of unrecognizable microscopic images. How was the audience to know the veracity of this claim? It seemed unlikely and yet possible that the pictures were of specimens of human materiality, representative of structures within everyone – like Shaw but not identical. They suggested a different constitution of the self than an audience might be used to. Instead of seeing the external surfaces of the body, for example the face, the ‘I’ was staged as being composed of invisible biological structures. In their myopic detail, however, many of the images looked anything but human, and instead they conjured lunar landscapes, complex architectural forms, alien life and marine environments. The instance of displaying and objectifying the inner microscopic body demonstrated its radical alterity to the subject, for whom these features are usually obscure.

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As we witnessed these deeply unfamiliar representations, Shaw asked if she could trust the audience, to the point of suggesting that they might have had a gun or a stethoscope in their pockets, both of which she found threatening (Shaw 2011: 143). Although humorous in the juxtaposition, the eliding of the gun and the stethoscope suggested that, for Shaw, medical technology can be indicative of untrustworthiness, and it can be dangerous and unsettling. Both gun and stethoscope are tools that can be used to dominate and control bodies, changing lives through their ability to subjugate through forms of violating action. The stethoscope signifies medical expertise and can be used to objectify the subject through abstract measurement and diagnosis; it renders the patient silent even as it is used to listen to internal organs – a potent weapon indeed. In fact, reclaiming specimenhood in this work was very much connected with voice and language, contrary to the muting power of much medical technology. Shaw speaks back to medical students in her workshops in order to insert the patient’s voice into their training. In the performance, she spoke her body and its parts through her own language that relied on metaphor and imagery rather than medical terminology. In fact, medical vocabulary seems distinctly inadequate for the task of presenting the self as a hybrid, interconnected and embodied being. As the sequence came to an end and part three began, Shaw moved in front of the screen and stood on a stage block so that she was caught in the light of the projections. She told the story of finding a dead and decomposing bird, a ‘skeleton in your closet’, that has been reduced to a delicate pile of bones, and compared to her own ‘guts’ – guts in the sense of having courage and guts that constitute the absent flesh of the dead body (Shaw 2011: 144). A little later in the show, part five was a more personal and autobiographical account of Shaw’s life and its effect on her body. She staged herself as a queer specimen for the audience to scrutinize in fragmented form, asking ‘would you like to see my body?’ She stood in a spotlight that only illuminated her face, neck and left shoulder, lowering her jacket and shirt to reveal the flesh of that shoulder and reflecting on her masculine physicality that made her feel ‘like a bull in a china shop’, mindful that ‘[m]y Adam’s apple combined with my suit and tie is what’s confusing you’ (Shaw 2011: 146). Moving to another spotlight that only caught her face, she provided a kind of medical history, a list of injuries, conditions and

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ways that her body has borne the brunt of her life through trauma, accidents, illness and having a baby. She ‘has been thirteen bodies’ in her life, but the audience saw ‘only one of them’ (Shaw 2011: 146). There are different histories stored in Shaw’s body, all with their own traces and affective durations and part of which involve relationships, love, desire and loss. In part nine, Shaw described a first encounter with a lover, an erotic connection made through ‘a sound from the dangerous part of your body. Like an Italian sports car’ (Shaw 2011: 153). Shaw’s reciprocal gesture of desire and commitment flips the specimen on its head, as it becomes the ultimate lover’s gift: ‘I’ll be your pathological specimen./You can label, measure,/strip and count me./You can squeeze me into a chest of drawers,/bottle me in a jar’ (Shaw 2011: 153). The objectifying medical gaze that reduces the subject to object became a form of consensual and sensual dominance and surrender. In the final section of the show, Shaw stood on her block once more and turned to geological and evolutionary metaphors to describe a body that slowly changes and is simultaneously liable to spontaneous and unexpected activity, akin to volcanoes and earthquakes that suddenly erupt and shift the earth of her embodiment (Shaw 2011: 154). She re-invoked a constant theme throughout the show, that of elephants. The title itself, MUST, refers to ‘musth’ in male bull elephants when they experience a significant spike in their testosterone levels, making them very aggressive. It can also be accompanied by sticky secretions from the temporal ducts located on the side of their heads, a feature that Shaw compared to crying (Shaw 2011: 155). Talking about elephants grieving the death of their kin and being attentive to their skeletal remains, Shaw reflected on their seeming capacity to show love through their handling of bones and how memories can be invoked through this touch. Representing an intimate and overwhelmingly tender way of connecting with loved ones, she suggested to an imagined lover that ‘it’s okay to die and leave your bones here with me’ (Shaw 2011: 157). She was deeply touched by the bones of the bird, described above, and metaphorically reached out to touch their tiny structures. Through association, she also mentioned the bones of Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, whose bones are now ‘lonely and dusty’ because there is ‘no one looking at them, no one paying to see them, no on touching and running their fingers gently along their surface’ (Shaw 2011: 154). As the final remains

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of human and animal life, bones for Shaw are repositories of being, memory and connectivity between the dead and the living. Far from being meaningless waste, dusty piles of old bones are highly emotive and evocative objects that project into the future through their remaining trace. Shaw’s work re-orientates the idea and position of the specimen from an objectified and displayed body to that of a complex biosubjectivity, composed of biological and social features that are deeply enmeshed and co-constituting. Far from being excised and separated in order to be subjected to the medical gaze, Shaw conveyed a queer, infiltrated body that is hybrid and always affected by the other, ‘you’ – the audience, a lover, a child, a parent, a doctor, a friend. Such a body is changed and impressed as much by emotions, time and memories, as it is by physiological events and trauma. What the medical specimen negates in favour of the clinical and the detached, Shaw reinstated in order to present bodies as porous and open to others, human and non-human, in an infinitely social and affective realm that always leaves its trace in the subject-as-body. How far medicine can locate those traces is a moot point and one that Shaw playfully and poetically implied through her narrative.

The undead specimen: Martin O’Brien’s queer zombie years Martin O’Brien is a UK-based live artist, whose practice centres on his living with cystic fibrosis (CF), a chronic (long-lasting) genetic condition causing an excessive build-up of mucus in the body. His work has explored the effect that this has on his body in terms of the symptoms and the treatment that he has to submit to on a daily basis. As a medical subject, he has performed his private therapeutic regimes in Mucus Factory (2011–13) – a durational piece that involved cycles of trampolining to encourage mucus production, chest pummelling on a tilted table to help with loosening and draining it, and prolonged coughing to evacuate excess phlegm into specimen pots. Staging these essential treatments within his live art, O’Brien demonstrates the need for him to be subjected to medical interventions as life-enhancing practices that also exposes their disciplinary features and the violence necessarily perpetrated on his

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body as an intrinsic part of managing the illness. Whilst O’Brien does perform his specimenhood in these treatment protocols, working on specific parts of his body, to identify a straightforward Cartesian split between subject/mind and object/body misses other more complicating aspects brought to the fore in his practice. He does not simply observe or measure himself, as one might do with a blood pressure monitor, but he has to physically engage in chest slapping and consciously adjusts his respiration in order to move mucus away from his airways and towards clearance. In other words, his experience of being a specimen involves Merleau-Ponty’s ‘double sensations’ of touch and touching, of being subject and object in a flickering alternation. The CF brings O’Brien’s body more fully into his lived awareness, according to Drew Leder’s work on what he calls the ‘absent body’ (1990). This is a phenomenological account of how embodiment is experienced, with Leder arguing that most of our worldly encounters involve a sense of the body disappearing into the background of perception. For instance, sensory awareness obscures the sensing organ from the ‘perceptual field’; the nose itself does not feature in perceptions of smell and we do not ‘taste our taste buds’ (Leder 1990: 14). Whilst the body is mostly experienced as an absence, even though it is a constant interface with the world, Leder suggests that it is at times of dysfunction that one’s physical embodiment is most present and noticeable. A stomach ache means that the viscera is brought to awareness, although it is unlikely to provide a specific or detailed sense of inner anatomy; a sore throat foregrounds the usually unconscious action of swallowing. Leder calls this the ‘dys-appearing’ body, which becomes present to the self through some form of malfunction, distress or disease (Leder 1990: 86). These are the times when the body appears in perception as dividual. Leder goes on to consider how such dysappearance is marked by ‘being away, apart, asunder’ at times of illness; for example, the body can seem to be radically Other, so that the ‘experienced self is rent in two as one’s corporeality exhibits a foreign will’ and the body is distanced from its normal equilibrium (Leder 1990: 87). Yet, this perceptual shift remains firmly within the individual, the perceived as the perceiver, rather than being between ‘ontologically separate’ things; the ‘body-object is a body-subject’ throughout these experiences (Leder 1990: 87).

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The audience of O’Brien’s work is made to confront these embodied tensions, as his actions highlight them: the involuntary production of excess mucus demands his attention and physical intervention; his managed physiotherapy routines on his own body  as he asserts a measure of control over it; and, the points where body-object threatens to overwhelm the body-subject, when he struggles to clear his airways to regain breath and his pallor changes to an alarming red. In some works, such as It’s Good to Breathe In (This Devon Air) (2015), O’Brien etches a pair of outline lungs onto his chest with a scalpel. The outlines are the most basic anatomical signifiers, mimicking the drawing that trainee doctors often undertake on each other to reinforce their learning of anatomy, but this self-inflicted action also emphasizes his relationship with his dys-appearing body and with medicine. Being cut and the one who cuts, he adopts the role of subject and object, patient and medic, in a way that simultaneously draws attention to the constitutive nature of his illness and ongoing specimenhood as part of his subjectivity. O’Brien performs ‘I’ in such a way that reveals the always fundamental and dense relationship interconnecting body and self. For some, cutting his own flesh indicates an excessive and troubling relationship being laid bare between self and body. O’Brien has adopted the mantra and practices of the late Bob Flanagan, a fellow CF artist, who advocated ‘fighting sickness with sickness’ by subverting the brutality he has to inflict on his body and via other medical professionals, into sado-masochistic surfeit that could be playful and painful. For instance, in Regimes of Hardship (2012), O’Brien wore a rubber hood that had the potential to suffocate him. As he began to struggle to breathe, this daily threat for the person with CF was made frighteningly visible in the public space as the rubber was more violently sucked in to his mouth and displaced by his ragged breathing. It seemed to last too long, to run to the end of his breath, before he removed the hood. In Mucus Factory, the medical technology of the nebulizer, used to inhale medication, became a sexualized object that O’Brien inserted into his anus. In this way, medical equipment is also aestheticized in his practice, along with his mucus, which he represents through green slime, paint and liquid, dousing himself in its constant and potentially overwhelming presence.

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Any mucus that he actually expels during his performances, O’Brien carefully collects in lidded specimen pots that become part of the mise-en-scène. Momentarily reflecting medical practice, the excretions are treated as abject clinical waste and put into storage. No longer part of O’Brien, deliberately ejected, the mucus is treated as a separated substance and discarded, effectively turning it into a specimen. He challenges these processes, however, by then turning it into productive matter that he joyfully plays with. Stretching it between his fingers and letting it elongate dramatically as it falls through a slow elasticity, he also mixes it with glitter and rubs it onto his body and uses it as hair gel. In the ultimate act of reincorporation, he swallows it back into himself. Far from enforcing the gap between self and specimen, he teasingly takes back his own body matter, inducing a shudder of abjection in his spectator. The shudder admits the powerful social taboos around abject substances that such consumption exposes. CF is a life-shortening condition and O’Brien celebrated his thirtieth birthday in 2017, the year that was meant to be the outer limit of his life expectancy. Already affected by CF as an experience of death-in-life, the approach and passing of this chronological measure have been reflected in his more recent practice. Thinking about this achievement of living-beyond, he claims that he is now in his ‘zombie years’. Death has changed shape and meaning through the passing of this horizon and he articulates it as being behind him now, outlasted and outmanoeuvred. The final section of this analysis of his work will consider the figure of the zombie in his latest piece as the apocalyptic specimen and how O’Brien deployed it to continue to blur the boundaries between subject and object, in such a way that new bioethical relations can be conceived. O’Brien’s identification with the figure of the zombie emerges from his sick status,1 recognizing an affinity with the idea of the monstrous being as undead, infected and outside of the bounds of the healthy. In a culturally medicalized landscape dominated by the discursive rhetoric and saturation of images of health and the ‘norm’, he finds political potential in the excluded community of the zombie hoard. Creating a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world in the film The Unwell (2016), he imagined a place where ‘only the unwell survive’ and where health is a disadvantage, its own death sentence. In fact, sickness is ‘the development of human kind’

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and means endurance into the future, in the face of ecological and epidemic catastrophe (O’Brien and MacDiarmid 2018: 132). Foregrounding illness and inverting the model of health being the sought-after condition, O’Brien explores Jonathan Metzl’s proposition that health ‘is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position’ (Metzl 2010: 2). Metzl claims that, as a concept, health is often linked to moral judgements, to commercial interests, to discrimination and exclusion and worthy, therefore, of critical analysis and challenge. O’Brien performed this philosophical approach through taking on the cultural myth of the zombie, dressing up his illness with the fantasy of another infected body that is marginalized and threatening but also enduring and resistant. Medicine’s paradigmatic specimen is the corpse and O’Brien re-routed his own CF specimenhood through the ultimate cataclysmic medical aberration – the undead zombie. This is the cadaver that has been re-animated, a voracious consumer and mindless labourer (a perfect capitalist metaphor) that threatens to overwhelm the logic of modern medicine. It exceeds the disciplinary regimes of biopower that seek to control the population and the individual. Existing on the margins of society, the zombie is a potentially contaminating force that O’Brien uses to explore the relations between illness and health, subjectivity and sickness, disease and the other. In his work Taste of Flesh/ Bite Me I’m Yours (2015), the final section incorporated zombie consumption through his attempts to bite the audience. Tethered to a central pole in a makeshift room, O’Brien established himself as a queer predator, chasing the audience around the edges of the space and trying to make contact, resulting in him biting his prey if he could get hold of them. Far from being intimidating, this became a game of catch and surrender for some, as they willingly placed themselves in his path, offering their flesh for eating. The whole audience was caught in the nervous excitement of the game, trying to manoeuvre themselves out of the way, and the bites elicited surprised yelps – perhaps harder nibbles than some were expecting. Audience members became zombie-oriented objects to be tasted and tested by O’Brien’s desire for fleshy contact, mouth to flesh. In that moment of intertwining between biting and being bitten, he exposed the risk in such closeness – in terms of contamination but also in being vulnerable to the Other – and the possibility of connection through an openness to the touch of the Other.

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In the work of both Peggy Shaw and Martin O’Brien, there is use made of the performance of specimenhood to challenge medical authority in relation to the queer and ill body. They perform alternative subjectivities and understandings about the body that suggest medicine’s limitations and the ways that it renders passive and silences certain identities and experiences. There is a resistance to the control and containment of the unruly body in terms of the marginalized Other in this practice that also performatively challenges the modernist ideal of the autonomous subject and neoliberal agendas to govern the self appropriately and productively. They present boundaries between self and other as fluid and unstable through their embodied approaches to their own ontologies. Their selfhood is dependent upon relationality with others, upon connection, excess and forms of celebratory cross-contamination. Recent criticism of bioethics has focused on the traditional subject of bioethical analysis as this same modernist subject – the one who is autonomous, rational and self-contained. Shildrick, for instance, suggests that this subject is far from universal: ‘the humanist moral subject, theorised as an ideal, abstract, quasi-transcendent, nongendered “person”, is in practice invariably gendered as male’ (Shildrick 1997: 146). She goes on to argue that this subject is constructed via these desirable attributes and via the exclusion of ‘the subject’s putative others’ (Shildrick 1997: 146). She identifies these ‘others’ as women, long cast as the inferior, irrational, too embodied opposite of the male in scientific and philosophical terms. This category of ‘other’, however, can easily be extended to include sick, impaired, queer, racialized and classed bodies; in other words, those who are ‘habitually the site of clinical intervention’, subject to constant medicalized discourse and surveillance (Shildrick 1997: 169). At the same time, new media scholar Joanna Zylinska argues for a new mode of bioethical thinking foregrounded in bioart and I want to suggest that such potential is also manifest in these modes of creative practice. Zylinska heralds the ‘performative aspect of the instability of the boundary between human and animal’ in bioart as offering new bioethical insights (Zylinska 2009: 159). Shaw and O’Brien trouble at the same boundaries of the human and the nonhuman through their inclusion of the animal and the zombie in their performed subjectivities. They contest the dichotomies and hierarchies of the body-object/body-subject, sickness/health and self/other, destabilizing the masculine humanist subject through their queer stagings and playful specimen displays.

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Exogenous specimenhood: Paul/Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie This final section examining queer specimens and their political potential engages with the performative writing of trans man, gender writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Writing as Beatriz Preciado, his book, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013), recounts his experience of taking the hormone testosterone for one year, interspersed with critical essays on the construction of gender and sexuality in the twenty-first century. In his own words, the decision to take testosterone was not ‘to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism’ but ‘to foil what society wanted to make of me’ (Preciado 2013: 16). It was a political strategy that enacted a form of resistance to patriarchy and to heterosexuality through the creation of a new kind of subjectivity. This was borne out of selfmedicating with testosterone, introducing a hormonal regime to the body outside of the purview of medical care. As a ‘self-appointed guinea-pig of sexual politics’, Preciado used biotechnology to alter his chemical and molecular self – a female specimen becomingmasculine through biohacking tactics (Preciado 2018: online). The start of the process marked the only engagement with medicine as the ubiquitous hegemonic authority and gate-keeper of hormonal therapies, as Preciado recorded the dosage and the text of the accompanying leaflet for the testosterone gel that he had acquired from a friend. As he reads and comments on the guidance, the fact that it is explicitly directed to men, and thereby required the rejection of female identity, suggests that ‘masculinity and femininity are pharmacopornographic fictions retroactively defined in relationship to the molecule with which they are treated’; in other words, ‘clinical masculinity does not exist without synthetic testosterone’ (Preciado 2013: 60–1). The idea of the pharmacopornographic era is at the centre of Preciado’s philosophical, political and embodied project and is productive here in articulating new ways of thinking about the contemporary specimen. It derives from a range of theoretical works (including Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and specifically from a grounding in the work of Michel Foucault and his development of the idea of biopolitics, which Preciado views as only going so far to address the context of life in the twenty-first century.

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Preciado identifies the emergence of the pharmacopornographic regime in the post-Second World War environment, when a combination of new technologies and medicalized disciplinary practices started to define sex and gender in new ways. The roots of these practices can be traced back to the nineteenth century and certainly overlap with Foucault’s categories of the regimes of sovereignty and discipline, according to Preciado. But, whereas the body in these figurations was treated externally, in the pharmacopornographic era ‘technologies become part of the body: they dissolve into it, becoming somatechnics’ (Preciado 2013: 78, emphasis in original). Through the development of synthetic drugs and hormones, such as the contraceptive pill, Viagra and speed, and the construction of gender in the clinic, Preciado argues that contemporary subjectivity is based on molecular and chemical manipulation – the new biopolitical system of control. This is intertwined with ‘biomediatic’ technologies, such as the virtual and the digital, that have enabled pornography to become ‘the great mainstay of our cybereconomy’ (Preciado 2013: 37). Now that anyone with a camera, internet connection and bank account can create a porn site, Preciado identifies the ‘autopornographic body’ as a ‘new force in the world economy’ and an exemplar for global cyber-markets, being cheap to produce, offering a direct form of personalized communication and instant customer satisfaction (Preciado 2013: 38–9). Developing the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Preciado follows the line that contemporary capitalism is focused on communication, knowledge exchange and affect, but moves the argument about biopolitics ‘below the belt’ (Preciado 2013: 36–7). Here, he identifies ‘orgasmic force’ or ‘potentia gaudendi’ that is ‘the (real or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation’ and now put to work by capitalism (Preciado 2013: 41, emphasis in original). Orgasmic force is applicable to all materiality, as it is a molecular potentiality, with capitalism deriving value from its pleasure and excitation that are technologically enabled and produced – via masturbatory pornography, prosthetics and synthetic drug use. Ultimately, then, ‘biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul. In biotechnology and in pornocommunication there is no object to be produced. The pharmacopornographic business is the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction’ (Preciado 2013: 35–6, emphasis in original).

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As a gender activist, Preciado argues that sex and gender have previously been visually verified and constructed in biopolitical regimes but in the pharmacopornographic era this means that this has moved to the molecular level, inside the body. With biocapital increasingly concerned with hormones, supplements, steroids and stimulants that excite or relax the body, gender and sexuality are likewise being enhanced and reinforced through these new technologies. Certain identities are thus strengthened through technical means, which Preciado identifies as ‘cis-’ and ‘trans’. Both positions are still subject to visual confirmation, but also ‘performative production, and morphological control’ (Preciado 2013: 127). Working from within the system, however, he advocates a sexual revolution and the eventual overturning of heterosexuality through the subversive use of the same technologies. So, transformation does not come from outright rejection of these technologies but through ‘differential use and reappropriation’ of these same techniques (Preciado 2013: 129). This Preciado does by undertaking his year-long self-medication with testosterone, ‘poisoning’ his body ‘with a chemical signifier culturally branded as masculine’, a ‘vaccination’ programme that he calls a ‘technique of resistance for bodies that have been assigned the status of cisfemales’ (Preciado 2013: 396). Testo Junkie is partly a performative writing of this process of becoming-masculine through using the body as a radical test specimen. The new specimenhood of resistance to social norms of gender and sexuality is staged through the deviant use of pharma (this term refers to pharmaceutical drugs). Preciado’s is a chemical and, therefore, molecular intervention, operative through the introduction of exogenous toxins into his body through cutaneous infiltration. Applying sachets of Testogel to his skin in daily 50-milligram doses, Preciado engages with the ‘miniaturization’ and ‘internalization’ of current biopolitical control mechanisms. These are usually used to adapt bodies into appropriately managed and desiring capitalist consumers (Preciado 2013: 79). He uses the contraceptive pill, for instance, as an example of how the technologies of the pharmacopornographic era are being used to enhance certain features of femininity, such as the pill being used to treat excessive body hair in cis-females and manage menstrual cycles. Thus, femininity is being controlled and coerced through micro-prosthetic means that transform the female body into ‘a

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normalized heterosexual female body, with a depressive but stable temperament and a passive or frigid sexuality’ (Preciado 2013: 218). In a political manoeuvre of subversive adoption of the same gendering technologies, Preciado doses himself on testosterone as an act of ‘biodrag’. Taking his cue from Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, he extends this to the pharmacopornographic era and the notion of ‘living mimicry’, where synthetic chemicals can transform the very materiality of the body into current gender fictions. In the same vein as Butler’s subversive gender potential being located in drag, Preciado similarly advocates for resisting gender norms through biodrag that goes against prescribed rules. He takes testosterone outside of normal medical contexts of diagnosis, prescription and treatment as an act of politicized gender sabotage. It has no effect on his external gender appearance, as the dose is too low to impact on hair growth, muscle mass or voice, but his writing narrates a becoming-masculine from within. Preciado identifies these changes ‘in my affect, in my inner perception, in my sexual excitation, in the odor of my body, and in resistance to fatigue’ (Preciado 2013: 141). In his self-medicating, queer specimenhood, he becomes subject and object to the point where these no longer matter, resisting medicoscientific practices of objectivity and surveillance usually associated with undertaking drug therapies. There are no check-ups, blood tests, assessment protocols or dosage adjustments, only his sense of self and his own perceptions as his body absorbs the testosterone. Without measurements or biodata of any kind, his writing captures instead the affective ramifications of the hormone, his feelings and desires, his sense of alertness, erotic arousal and heightened awareness of being-in-the-world. It is more phenomenological in its accounting than medical. This form of bioterrorism also touches on the porosity of the self to otherness but in different terms to those performed by Shaw and O’Brien. Preciado proposes and performs a self that is transformed and its political potential released through the exchange of synthetic substances, in this case, at the body’s surface. In incorporating pharmacopornographic technologies against their intended aims into his body, he adjusts affective relations within himself, and between himself and others, and the world. A key feature of Preciado’s political practice is the figure of the self-experimenter or the ‘auto-guinea pig’, as he calls it (Preciado 2013: 348). In considering pharmacopornographic engagements

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with the molecular, excitable self to produce normative gender and sex ‘biocodes’, Preciado suggests it would be politically anachronistic not to engage in the same through politicized experiments with these chemical prosthetics that are ‘performative and biotechnological’ acts (Preciado 2013: 352). Forms of pharmacopornographic bioterrorism will activate the subject in new, radical ways that resist the imposition of coercively controlled, passive and docile gender identities, stirred to certain forms of desire that capitalism can produce value from. He envisages a future ‘technosomatic communism’, where biocapital is overthrown and biocodes of sex and gender are removed from the circuits of capitalist enterprise and private ownership, to be re-distributed to collective control. For Preciado, the auto-guinea pig is the first step towards this new political subjectivity that aims to ‘reclaim the right to participate in the construction of biopolitical fictions’ (Preciado 2013, emphasis in original). Instead of the specimen or test subject being external to and distanced from the self, the auto-experimenter enacts laboratory-style work on themselves, a practice that will be the focus of the next chapter.

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This chapter focuses on the medical self-experimenters, the persons who willingly and actively turn themselves into a research subject or specimen in order to investigate or test something on themselves. Using their own bodies as a laboratory and their tissues as source material, they combine the roles of scientific researcher and subject, collapsing distinctions and taking responsibility for experimental work by doing tests and trials on themselves. There has been a substantial body of self-experimenters in medical history, particularly in the late nineteenth and early part of the twenty-first centuries, when there was a significant upsurge in identifying new drugs and technologies for medical use. These ranged from doctors testing anaesthetic drugs on themselves, such as ether and chloroform, to researchers undertaking cardiac catheterization techniques, dietary experiments and cancer research (Altman 1987). It remains a feature of contemporary medical research with, for instance, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren being awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, following Marshall’s ingestion of a specific bacterium (campylobacter pyloridis). His self-testing proved that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria rather than lifestyle factors, having developed gastritis following self-inflicted bacterial infection (Altman 1987: 33–4). There seems to be something of a resurgence of interest in and presentation of the self-experimenter in the early twenty-first century, with mainstream medical journalists in the UK undergoing a range of self-testing for scientific documentaries, alongside amateur biohackers and trackers establishing and recording their own trials

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relating to drug treatments, diets, fitness and psychology. A current mainstay of British medical documentaries, Dr Michael Mosley is a self-declared auto-experimenter, initially inspired by the work of Marshall and Warren on stomach ulcers (he was nominated for a BAFTA for a television documentary on their experiment). His journalism incorporates regular self-testing, with this topic being the focus of his first television series, Medical Mavericks (2007 for the BBC). Since then he has subjected himself to diet regimes, exercise trials, sleep tests, neurological experiments and, perhaps most famously, infecting himself with tapeworms. For the one-off programme Infested! Living with Parasites (2014), Mosley went to Kenya to source infected beef and to find tapeworm cysts, which contain the larva, to ingest. The programme includes footage of Mosley apprehensively swallowing the cysts and acknowledging the irony of self-infection with a parasite that millions of people live with but want to get rid of. Back in the UK and after six weeks since ingestion, he swallowed a pill camera to capture images of the metre-long worms active in his gut. He expressed horror at the sight of these worms inside him but also pleasure at the experiment working, as gastroscopic footage showed the tapeworms snaking down and through his intestine. Once achieved, Mosley took medication to destroy the worms and flush them from his body. He does admit that the choice of self-experimentation in these instances makes for more entertaining television, but he is also tapping into various legacies and tropes of the self-experimenter. The medical history of self-experimenters, such as it is, is dominated by men. This is unsurprising, given women’s exclusion from the profession until at least the end of the nineteenth century. In the UK, for example, it was only with the passing of the 1876 Medical Act that women could be licensed to practise, once appropriately qualified. Women’s absence from the narrative speaks to their lack of recognition and even erasure in relation to the construction of medical epistemology. It seems entirely plausible that women, working within their local communities as nurses, carers, homeopaths and midwives would also have been autotesters but their stories have not been told or recorded. Instead, the literature usually depicts a view of heroic masculinity, with the self-experimenter acting altruistically for the benefit of all and for the future progress of science and medicine. Lawrence Altman’s comprehensive survey of these practices, for example, describes the

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men who he writes about as variously courageous, serious-minded, heroic and wholly dedicated to their research. Each case conveys a sense of professional and personal risk-taking, persistence in the face of adversity, selflessness, self-sacrifice and a reliance on patrilineal networks to make the necessary scientific connections and take the work forward. Common to these narratives in relation to the doctors is a focus on the absence of willing volunteers, of perceptions that leading the way depends on ‘going first’ and of the act of self-experiment helping to forge better relations with patients, who might then be expected to undergo the same therapies. Whilst this final point speaks of the development of empathic relations through selfexperimentation, the gesture of going first also suggests being a pioneer, an adventurer and a leader. Certainly, Mosely’s adoption of self-experimentation encapsulates some of these features; the brave, specifically male, medical explorer taking risks vicariously on behalf of the audience in order to test groundbreaking research or to evaluate existing therapies and regimes. He endures the ingestion of tapeworm larva so that the spectator can eventually see it living in his gut. He is right – it does make for more interesting viewing than an abstract piece of footage of a tapeworm in an anonymous body. In other words, the staging of himself as a specimen, undergoing tests on his own body, heightens the drama for the audience and moves it into the realm of self-spectacularization. It returns to the ideas of autopsia and teipsum (see Chapter 1 for more detail on these concepts), seeing for oneself and knowing oneself, but opening these concepts to include others, who then might know themselves better through witnessing these surrogate acts. This noble and gutsy view of the self-experimenter is only one side of the story, however, as these practices have also been viewed with distrust and scepticism. The auto-tester has alternatively been considered as the unnecessary risk-taker, the maverick (as exemplified by the title of Mosely’s television series on the subject) and the attention-seeker. Instead of epitomizing an adventurous spirit, they are considered to be unethical practitioners, operating outside of the bounds of medical principles, without regard for safety, their own well-being or scientific standards. After all, how can the self-experimenter adopt an objective stance in relation to their research when they themselves are the guinea pig and the subject? Often carried out in secret and without appropriate authorization

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means that these experiments can be viewed as foolhardy and liable to bring medicine into disrepute. The Nuremberg Code of 1947 was the first ethical convention to consider human experimentation, drafted in response to the discovery that the Nazi’s medical research was inhumane in the extreme (Altman 1987: 17). The code supports experiments on humans as often being the only satisfactory way to make advances, but they have to be fully consented to and conducted appropriately by qualified researchers. Article 5 of the code makes specific reference to doctors undertaking self-tests: ‘No  experiment should be conducted, where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects’ (Altman 1987: 17). It is interesting that the code allows doctors to take such risks that might incur bodily harm, suggesting assumptions of informed consent and expert knowledge that make such risk-taking permissible on the private, skilled body of the clinician. Mosley’s televised experiments draw attention to this issue of informed consent via explanations of the aims and objectives of the tests and by pointing out any possible risks or anxieties that he has. He reassures himself and the audience about the procedures through his specialist insights as a doctor and asserts confidence in his colleagues and their work. The tests might be unpleasant, but he has things to learn and will pass that knowledge onto the audience, whilst he is in the best possible hands, therefore minimizing any dangers. The inherent tensions within the idea of the self-experimenter also appear in other contemporary contexts, where rigorous monitoring of the self can be undertaken in an effort to conform to societal norms but can also be deployed as a means of testing the veracity and authority of medico-science. As already explored in Chapter 2, the neoliberal subject in late capitalist societies is encouraged to be an auto-tester of their health, fitness and general well-being. This is part of sociologist Nikolas Rose’s understanding of the biopolitical subject in the twenty-first century, who operates within ‘a politics of “life itself”’, whereby every aspect of biological life is increasingly checked, managed, modified and optimized (Rose 2007: 3). This shift has been underpinned by ever more sophisticated technologies and data production to apply to the individual self at the micro level. Recording, evaluating and adjusting biological function and efficiency on a daily, and even moment-by-moment,

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basis turn selves inside out as versions of internal physiology are made visible in various ways. With diets, drugs, fitness regimes, treatments and surgery all possible avenues for augmenting the self, ‘corporeal existence and vitality of the self has become the privileged site of experiments with the self’ (Rose 2007: 26). This biomedicalization of ‘life itself’ is a move beyond the co-constitutive role of medicalization in relation to modernity, which sought to manage ‘external nature’, into the postmodern self being coconstituted by the biomedical that focuses on the internal and the biological (Clarke et al. 2003: 164). Biomedicalized specimenhood therefore incorporates aspects of self-experimentation to produce its subjectivity. In popular culture, there are some public and self-declared selfexperimenters, who take these somatic possibilities to extremes. Extending and toughening some features of the narrative of selfhelp and accepting personal responsibility in relation to the body, health and productivity, they undergo excessive versions of more normative regimes and encourage adoption of radical versions of mainstream practices around care of the self. For example, Timothy Ferriss, a US entrepreneur and auto-experimenter, promotes biohacking as a means towards rapid self-improvement and optimal life performance. In his 2011 book The 4-Hour Body, he confesses to using ‘the kind of self-experimentation mainstream practitioners can’t condone’ and revels in his supposed maverick and macho approach (Ferriss 2011: 5–6). This is self-justified through his personal, physical and business success, as well as suggesting that current diet and exercise regimes are based on outdated and erroneous scientific research. The text aims towards ‘body redesign and performance enhancement’ that includes chapters on weight loss, increasing sperm count, swimming better and running faster (Ferriss 2011: 10). He offers anecdotes and descriptions of his own experiments and encounters with each issue, and exercises to follow and tips, including his achievements and measurements, in a kind of diary. Again, it is the authority and expertise of the selfexperimenter that are explicit and promoted; Ferriss has done all the experimental legwork on behalf of the reader. The reader just has to have the same courage and self-belief to follow through with their own testing and disciplinary activities. At a more grassroots level, there are communities of ‘selftrackers’ who utilize the latest technology and apps to continually

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monitor themselves, test different hypotheses and share data with each other. A key player in this field is the Californian company Quantified Self Labs, the creator of a global network of users who share their results, ask advice about new tracking technologies and participate in each other’s research.1 The company advocates ‘selfknowledge through numbers’, generated through each specimen subject engaging in similar monitoring and recording practices of their own biodata. The online platform is supplemented by the company promoting user ‘meet-ups’ and organizing a global, annual conference. It could be argued that these self-experimenting subjects are resisting the dominant discourse of neoliberal self-care, in terms of attempting to work outside of medicine and prescribed methods of enhancing the body. Favouring specimenhood that is based on self-discovery, much of the rhetoric invokes a challenge to medical science through the offer of new data, insights and outcomes that are self-generated. Being the specimen in auto-trials produces highly personalized results that can seem to be more useful than generic treatments based on averages and norms. The ambition and promise of a future of ‘personalized medicine’ so often proffered in medical discourse are here partially operative at the local and amateur level. As highlighted, in medical discourse there are lines of tension between the self-experimenter perceived as being a kind of heroic pioneer and an unethical maverick. For the amateur auto-tester, such as Ferriss, both positions are combined and promoted as manly and potent attributes, capable of shaking medico-scientific dogmas with innovative research and daring risk-taking. Being a self-experimenter in this context is aligned with new forms of entrepreneurialism that use the body as a source of biovalue and capital. Biocapital requires new sites, possibilities and ventures to continue expanding and increasing profits, here located in Ferriss’ attempts to produce a subjectivity that is ultra-focused and productive. Whilst his rhetoric is about self-help and whilst it challenges aspects of medico-science, his practice and aims are entirely heteronormative, producing a highly gendered subject, capable of operating at apparently peak levels in terms of health, vitality and virility – the perfect capitalist subject. In contrast, as outlined in the previous chapter, the more overtly politicized self-experimentation of Beatriz/Paul Preciado establishes a queer, resistant specimen within this frame, a radically different kind of amateur biohacker. Preciado’s gender bioterrorism proposes the auto-guinea pig as the antidote to the

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‘pharmacoporn complex’ of contemporary capitalism, in order to ‘create and demarcate new frameworks of cultural intelligibility for gender and sexual subjects’ (Preciado 2013: 352). Instead of sex and gender biocodes being controlled and manipulated by big pharma, governments and capitalist enterprise, Preciado advocates ‘technosomatic communism’, where these biocodes are returned to collective ownership and open exploration (Preciado 2013: 352). The auto-guinea pig begins their progressive political engagement by performing their own auto-experiments, and which operate outside of medical systems of diagnosis and prescription. In this way, Preciado suggests the figure of the auto-guinea pig as staging a radical, embodied specimenhood that queers medical and pharmaceutical regimes in order to practise new, gender-fluid subjectivities. Through utilizing the technologies of biocapital in unauthorized and non-prescribed ways, the auto-guinea pig works from within the system in a tactically subversive and largely undetectable mode. Following Preciado’s lead in terms of thinking about gender in relation to the self-experimenter and their capacity for performative political acts, this chapter will consider the work of female artists in this arena. Whilst there is a history in visual and performance art, at least since the 1960s, of artists using their own bodies in their work, those selected for inclusion here have specifically undertaken aspects of their practice within a biomedical context. Thus, their status as specimens and scientific auto-experimenters is integral to the ways that they think about and want to explore their bodies, their flesh and their own sense of personhood. Working in laboratory environments, they reflect on posthuman and bioethical concerns amid global networks of bioresource exchange, where forms of ‘clinical labour’ and disposable lives are foregrounded (Cooper and Waldby 2014).

Laboratory work: Kira O’Reilly’s Marsyas – Running Out of Skin A reflection on Kira O’Reilly’s artistic practice suggests a sustained engagement with forms of self-experimentation that broach and breach the boundaries of different bodies, her own and those of

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others, in order to interrogate relations between self and other, human and non-human. Working across modes of performance, installation, media and bioart, she explores the ethics of these relations and how we might care for others, often through the frames and contexts of medicine and now biomedicine.2 Interested in the practices, places and possibilities of biotechnology, her works set up encounters between bodies that highlight questions of co-existence, co-dependence, hybridity and the posthuman. An earlier work, Bad Humours/Affected (1998), for instance, staged the ancient practice of bloodletting with leeches, with O’Reilly presenting herself as the specimen body in sculptural, aestheticized form. Wearing a fulllength white circular skirt that encircled her naked torso, with her long hair pushed up over her head to cover her face, she offered her back for the leeches to be attached to. Once they had fastened to her skin, she draped herself over a stool, head bowed, skirt flowing outwards and the leeches stuck between her shoulder blades. Now in symbiosis, the leeches started to suck O’Reilly’s blood, becoming fatter with it, elongating their bodies, until they were sated and fell from the body in a glutted release. In piercing her skin to feed, they released trickles of blood that leaked down O’Reilly’s back, red against white, fluid against flesh. Supposedly able to restore the humoral balance of the body to equilibrium, the leeches are both curative and parasitic bodies, feeding and healing at the same time. Unlike Mosley’s self-experiment with tapeworms that largely focused on narrating his experience of infecting himself, O’Reilly’s work foregrounded the non-human as the point of interest and its encounter with the human, rather than the other way around. As the host body, she stayed silent and immobile, staging the leeches as the spectacle as they gorged on her blood. Instead of anxiety about this relationship being conveyed through horror or disgust, O’Reilly left her audience to make up their own minds on the work – she did not indicate how the leeches felt on her body and so the spectator could only imagine. The gesture of the piece was, therefore, towards sharing, of invitation and openness to the non-human other as the boundaries of her body were infiltrated and began to leak. Her blood became part of the leeches’ biological constitution, even as they injected anaesthetics and anti-coagulants into her, in a temporary cross-species physiological intermingling of molecules. Contrary to Mosley and other medical self-experimenters, this piece suggested a rejection of the model of the heroic pioneer and

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turned attention to a shared, non-hierarchical experience between non-human and human. Aestheticizing the process of blood-letting by foregrounding the leech meant shifting perception to a kind of reciprocity between bodies, rather than the non-human being in the service of the human. Mosley’s tapeworm experiment depended on his ability to use modern drugs to destroy them and expel them from his gut once he had achieved his aims; O’Reilly’s practice, instead, permitted the leeches to feed and survive. In 2003–4, O’Reilly worked as an artist-in-residence at the SymbioticA Laboratory at the University of Western Australia, undertaking a project called Marsyas – Running Out of Skin. The lab is dedicated to enabling artists to work with the techniques and technologies of wet biology in order to enhance understanding of the field but also to stimulate debate and critique of the life sciences through informed and practical engagement in its processes.3 O’Reilly’s project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, was intended to explore tissue culturing using her own skin cells to create an in vitro (meaning ‘in the glass’ and outside of the body), living lacework. By undergoing a skin biopsy to retrieve her epidermal cells, the plan was to then culture them outside of her body, growing them over a prefabricated lace structure. For the biological work, O’Reilly spent time in the lab, undertaking biopsies on pig cadavers and practising tissue culturing methods, whilst for the decorative lacework, she enlisted the help of the Lace Guild in Perth, Western Australia. This enabled the creation of a miniature lace framework from absorbable sutures and cotton that would then be seeded with ‘fibroblasts, pig skin cells, my skin cells’ to grow over the structure (O’Reilly 2008: 101).4 The turn in scientific practice to the microscopic and the cellular picked up pace in the twentieth century, having been initiated in the seventeenth century by, for example, the work of Robert Hooke, who published on the emergent field of microscopy and who was also interested in the fundamental structures of biological organisms. This epistemological shift is reflected in the specimen collections of medical museums through the twentieth century, ‘as pathologists took smaller and smaller samples’, culminating in today’s collections that are reduced ‘even further to the cellular and genetic scale’ (Alberti 2011: 73). At the same time, from the start of the twentieth century, laboratory practice ‘moved from in vivo to in vitro forms of experimentation’, with the interior of the (animal) body isolated,

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removed and enabled to live outside of the biological body, in full visibility in an artificial environment (Landecker 2007: 33). Landecker, in her study of cell culturing, argues that the ‘body was not replaced by the cell, nor reduced to it’ but these methods, instead, offer new ways of contemplating ‘the autonomy and activity of cellular life’, which, in turn, reconceived understandings of bodies, cells and the relations between them (Landecker 2007: 33). O’Reilly replicated this turn to the cellular and in vitro in her attempt to selfexperiment at the level of her cells. Tissue culturing projects in bioart often point towards the ethical and philosophical questions raised by in vitro technologies,5 where cells can be kept alive artificially and for indefinite durations (see Chapter 2 for a linked discussion about the HeLa cell line). The biomedical specimen is no longer dead or necessarily pathological, but can be vital, self-replicating and autonomous. These particular specimens beg questions about ownership, identity and the parameters of the self, if body parts can be separated and, at some level, made to live and endure elsewhere. For Landecker, ‘what had been inside and had constituted a powerful physiological notion of interiority and invisibility’ is now enabled to ‘live outside, visibly and autonomously’ and thus causing epistemic shifts in understandings of the cell, the body and the self (Landecker 2007: 61). The specimen pot, functioning as preservation vessel and display case, transforms into a transparent container for a living environment that is highly regulated and monitored to optimize biological processes. The specimen itself is living outside of any originary body, detached but not discarded, and containing the possibility of future identities and potentialities. For O’Reilly, this opportunity to work with ‘bodily materiality that originates from her body but has a continued living existence and proliferation in vitro’ is what initially inspired her to propose the project (2008: 97, emphasis in original). O’Reilly’s residency, through her self-experimentation, incorporated an interest in a dynamic, new form of specimenhood, made possible by current biotechnology – that of the living, dividual specimen. With cells, tissues and organs able to be kept alive outside of the body, O’Reilly wanted to explore these new possibilities and their meanings for her own subjectivity. Her separated cells would be mixed with those of another species, the pig, to create a unique cellular materiality based on artisanal craftwork in the lace structure. This transit of living biological material from one

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body to another, or from one body into the laboratory, inevitably raises questions about where the self is located and where, if, or when extracted biomatter stops being part of the self. At the level of organs, these issues have been in play for some time, given the similarities with transplant medicine and body parts being re-located and revived in another body. Recent critical scholarship on clinical transplantation has been focused on the ontological dilemmas raised by the living dividual body,6 particularly for the donor recipient, whose body incorporates biological material from another (see Chapter 3 for further discussion about transplantation). O’Reilly’s proposal was focused on the artist as the cellular originator and maintained a curiosity in what her biology would do in vitro. In other words, the relationship between the artist and the extracted cells would remain one of proprietary interest and connection, even as the work of living continued elsewhere and outside of O’Reilly. The first stage of the project involved O’Reilly working in the lab, learning how to carry out successful skin biopsies on pigs to harvest the required skin cells for culturing. She captured the process, technically and experientially, in her performative lecture and essay ‘Marsyas – Beside Myself,’ which outlines the scientific protocol she followed, from sterilizing the pig’s skin with ethanol, through excising the pig’s ear, to listing the order of chemical solutions and equipment required to produce her first batch of ‘pig dermal fibroblast’ (2008). Whilst the actions and language of the procedure are detached and clinical, experimenting on the non-human other in this way, sacrificed for the express purpose of research (on asthma in another set of university trials), seeped into O’Reilly’s dreams and she started to make ‘fiercely tender and ferocious identifications with the pig’ (2008: 99). She was affected by the death and dismembering of the animal to satisfy the workings of the lab and the researchers therein, including her own project’s demands. She expressed profound shame at her work with these pig cadavers as she proceeded through four biopsies over the months and invested in the ensuing care of nurturing their cultured cells. Her writing captured her awareness of the hazy boundaries between life and death, human and non-human, as the pigs’ very recently slaughtered bodies momentarily retained their warmth and malleability in the lab. She experienced the sense of life ebbing from each carcass and wanted to ‘meld into her warm flesh, my blood to her blood’ (2008: 97).

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These rehearsals used ‘the pig as dummy, stand in, double, twin, other self, doll, imaginary self’ before she was due to undergo her own biopsy (2008: 99). O’Reilly detailed her preparedness for this moment when the experiment could begin on and involve her own body. She had an appointment scheduled with a surgeon and outlined the procedure she must follow once she had her biopsy. She left the lab with her equipment to make the short drive to the clinic but got lost on the way, missing the appointment and the opportunity to culture her cells. Afterwards, in an email to a friend, she conveyed the visceral and affective importance of this lost reciprocal gesture: ‘to have what seemed like the final moment, the cutting off of me, the miniscule flaying of my skin … deferred ad infinitum’ left O’Reilly feeling ‘stunned’ and ‘stung’. This had become a ‘non-biopsy’ and a failed part of the project (2008). Unlike the teleological narratives of male self-experimenters in Altman’s collection of medical histories, which sometimes capture accident, injury and mishap but which all ultimately result in impressive medical achievement, O’Reilly’s non-biopsy meant that the outcome of the residency could not be pursued. There was no tissue culturing to make lace, but the process itself generated new work. From this traumatic experience, she went on to create the piece inthewrongplaceness (2005), a durational, solo piece for individual audience members, where she moved and stayed with a female pig cadaver in a slow encounter of intimacy, care, mourning and melding; a different form of reflection on her experimental encounters with these bodies in the laboratory. O’Reilly’s engagement in these particular lab practices revealed the ethical dilemmas of biological research, where certain bodies are privileged as experimental subjects and come to be regarded as a temporarily valuable but an instrumentalized and disposable resource. Specimenhood weighs on some much more than others and this inequity is reinforced in laboratories and experimental research, where the animal body is treated as expendable, in the same way that others have been and continue to be in the histories of medicine, such as the racialized, disabled and criminalized body. The work of medical ethicist Donna Dickenson suggests the inclusion of the female body in such a list, as the source of valued reproductive biomaterials, such as foetal stem cells, umbilical cord blood cells and ova, which have high research and commercial value. She notes that ‘[a]ll bodies are at risk from commodification, but women’s bodies are most at risk’, a situation that is reinforced

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both by the general social expectation that women’s bodies are more readily accessible than men’s and that they are increasingly valued as an important bioresource for their generative biology (Dickenson 2007: 25). For O’Reilly’s project, the animal was the experimental subject of choice and, whilst the project ultimately proposed interspecies mixing in vitro, the prior use of the animal body as a disposable resource and material for experimentation led O’Reilly to empathize with and relate to the animal subject, not least because they were both female. O’Reilly drew attention, in her writing, to the fact that the pigs being subjected to her scalpel in the lab were female, offering a further and unexpected significance for the project. Their shared femaleness, as bodies and specimens, heightened the connection that O’Reilly felt between their bodies, skin, flesh and being-in-the-world. The experiments involving the anatomization of the pigs drew affective responses from O’Reilly to do with feelings of mutual recognition and with her feelings of shame engendered by the exploitation of these pig bodies in the lab. She wanted to connect with the non-human and desired a proximity to the animals in their sacrificial dying. Her own planned self-experiment became, in some senses, an anticipated gesture of gratitude and reciprocity that was never fulfilled – a small moment of mutual wounding to symbolically bind O’Reilly and her pigs. Those emotions were then explored in inthewrongplaceness, with the artist selecting a female pig carcass to perform with, feeling the weight of the body, of loss, and its emptiness, as she moved with, alongside, and in and out of the pig’s body (O’Reilly 2008: 101). The ultimate aim of creating a living lace from tissue culturing also suggested women’s labour and craftwork through associations suggestive of ‘the domestic, the intimate, the private, the personal, undergarments, the feminine, the excessive, precious and precarious’ (O’Reilly 2008: 97). The gender of the experimental and experimenting subject resonates beyond the work and with the wider biomedical context, where female bodies provide a rich seam of bioresource but where, simultaneously, ‘women’s contribution to that use-value is not recognised in the marketplace because it is viewed under the same rubric as “home production”’ (Dickenson 2007: 56). There is an equivalence here with the lack of value attached to women’s domestic labour and, indeed, to women’s craftwork in the form of lace production. What O’Reilly eventually

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confronted through the research was the status of biological materials and specimens as a form of res nullius, or ‘property belonging to no one’ (Oxford English Dictionary online). Social scientists, Cooper and Waldby, assert that biomedicine is currently predicated on Lockean ideas of property and value in the body, whereby it is the scientist’s application of skill and intellect to biological materials that transfer property rights to them. There are no property rights in the body until this point (an idea more fully explored in Chapter 2). Biological tissues and organs have no intrinsic value until they are subject to scientific and technological intervention; this is the point at which biotech companies can and do claim intellectual property rights in life itself. This particular legal and philosophical approach has an impact on how biological matter is perceived by the scientific community, biotech companies and, by extension, the public, in that: ‘the bodily contribution of tissue providers and human research subjects appears as an already available biological resource, as res nullius’ (Cooper and Waldby 2014: 9, emphasis in original). If ex vivo materials are conceptualized as belonging to no one and already abandoned, a form of waste even, it means that attention is diverted from the roles and contributions that donors, experimental subjects and patients play in providing that material. As a ‘blind spot’, it also enables the affective labour provided by donors and others to be erased in these economies (Cooper and Waldby 2014: 10). O’Reilly’s encounter with the pigs in the research laboratory signalled this gap in realization and recognition as she had to tackle the uncomfortable reality of using non-human subjects as experimental material, possibly reared and definitely slaughtered for this express purpose. Her attempt to insert her own body into the research, as the tissue provider, also staged the forms of investment, labour and ‘embodied production’ that go into these procedures. Within the collaborative networks of tissue donation, O’Reilly was likewise ‘caught up with various forms of effort, compliance, self-care’ and ‘risk’ (Cooper and Waldby 2014: 101). In this way, her project unexpectedly revealed some of the current logics of biomedicine that assumes abandonment in relation to certain bodies and parts, their disposability as specimens and experimental subjects, and mechanisms that conceal the embodied and affective labour of tissue donation. Through working with biotechnological processes and engaging in fairly common but recent tissue culturing innovations, O’Reilly exposed some of the

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power imbalances in biological research between the bodies of scientists and biocapital entrepreneurs, and those other bodies that often constitute the commodifiable forms of life in the lab. The pigs’ bodies were mined for their research value – lungs for research on asthma, bone marrow extractions and skin for biopsies. In the end, a pig’s leg was selected to become dog food for the lab’s director, Oron Catts, until someone realized that the carcass was full of ‘non recoverable anaesthetics’ (O’Reilly 2008: 98). In her performative essay, she reflected on these fluctuating contexts for the body in the laboratory, by turns ‘animal, partial object, flesh, bio art resource, meat, food, and finally – biohazard’ (O’Reilly 2008: 98). Ultimately, even though O’Reilly’s instance of self-experimentation did not take place in this residency project, it connects with Preciado’s performative attempt to entangle with otherness at the level of the cellular, in order to explore new forms of identity. Resisting a hierarchical or subjectivizing stance, both practitioners sought openings towards others that are hybrid and enmeshed. Preciado promotes in vivo auto-experiments to subvert the current political context, which she or he calls the pharmacopornographic era, whilst O’Reilly selects in vitro protocols to amplify the self beyond the perceptible borders of the body. Both are interested in exploring the permeability of the body’s boundaries to re-think the subject as a co-dependent, interlaced self, constantly affected by and responsive to interchanges with others, be they cellular, muscular, sexual or psychical. Both use performative means to explore the political and ethical potential in these positions as self-experimenting specimens.

Banking specimens: ORLAN’s Harlequin Coat French artist ORLAN is particularly well-known for her selfexperiments involving cosmetic surgery in the 1990s. The series, titled The Re-Incarnation of Saint ORLAN, included the artist undergoing a series of nine surgical interventions to remould specific facial features into those of women in iconic artworks from the Western canon. She selected, for instance, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus and the Mona Lisa’s brow to be re-constructed on herself in order to stage her so-called re-incarnation ‘within the realms of Western

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art history’ and also to challenge ‘male-made idealized images of feminine beauty’ reflected in such paintings (O’Bryan 2005: 14). By experimenting on her own body, ORLAN also wanted to explore the position of the, usually, female patient within the institutionalized structures of cosmetic surgery. Interested in deconstructing male ideals of female beauty beyond art, she confronted the ideals imposed on women undergoing surgical interventions as similarly patriarchal and dependent upon a set of normative templates for facial reconstructions. Not against cosmetic surgery per se, ORLAN wanted to introduce free choice into the surgical environment, suggesting that a patient should be able to determine their own physiognomic results. By adopting her own selection methodologies and requesting non-normative templates for her facial surgeries, she opposed the standardized versions of beauty offered to women within art and medicine. ORLAN’s controversially radical self-experimentation performed these political ideas about gender and identity directly on her body and in the context of theatricalized operating theatres. Where the specimen body in the surgical space would usually be anaesthetised and passive, she chose to only have localized pain relief and so remained conscious throughout, often through some quite brutal procedures, including liposuction and the insertion of cheek implants. Allowing her to interact with those around her and with global audiences through live broadcasts during the surgeries, she also read texts from Kristeva and Artaud, amongst others, and answered questions (O’Bryan 2005: 15–18). A fully agentic subject for the duration, from planning to post-operative care, ORLAN claimed surgery, specifically cosmetic surgery, as the site of female self-experimentation rather than surrender to its static ideologies and practices that usually objectify, silence and subjugate patients, and, more categorically, women. Following a similar trajectory to O’Reilly, her work has since moved from the medical to the biomedical and she too undertook a residency project for three months at SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia a few years later than O’Reilly, in 2007. Titled Harlequin Coat, the work aimed to continue and extend ORLAN’s interest in ‘hybridization’ through ‘using the carnal medium of skin cells’ (ORLAN 2008: 83). Her initial intention was to create an organic coat made from a patchwork of skin cultures, including non-human and human skin cells, with various pigmentations and

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of different ages. This was to replicate and enliven the idea of the Harlequin described by Michael Serres in the introduction to his text The Troubadour of Knowledge (1991). Inspired by the figure of the Harlequin in commedia dell’arte, Serres’ story ‘is an allegory for a perfect hybrid’ because he ‘reflects different origins, wears multiple cloaks, and his tattooed skin consists of multiple pigmentation’ (Hallensleben and Hauser 2010: 140). Long fascinated by this character and tale, having used the Serres text as part of her fifth surgical operation in 1991, ORLAN sought the opportunity to use tissue culturing to create a living, hybridized coat made of skin cells, including her own. As a self-experimenter, and like O’Reilly, ORLAN planned to insert her own body, at the cellular level, into the experiment to mix her own cells in vitro with numerous others. Rather than occupying the alleged objective and distanced stance of the scientist, creating work distinct from herself, the choice to use and incorporate herself into the project was crucial to her longterm thinking about identity and embodiment. Part of the residency and preparation for the creation of the coat involved ORLAN in sourcing cells for culturing together. She underwent her own skin biopsy at the University of Western Australia as part of this process, an event that was theatricalized in a similar way to her earlier surgeries. Located in an operating theatre, the surgical bed was draped in a harlequin cover of brightly coloured diamond shapes and replicated in ORLAN’s own costume of an all-in-one harlequin suit. The otherwise empty operating room was populated by a number of onlookers, situated around the bed, recording the biopsy and ORLAN’s surgical specimenhood – the patient at the centre of this clinical orchestration, acted upon but also acting in the scene, including reading aloud the Serres text.7 In terms of using other cells and the idea of creating an entire living coat, it quickly became apparent that the project was overly ambitious and that a whole coat of cultured skin cells was beyond current biotechnological means. The final multi-media installation, first shown at the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia, in September 2007, instead focused on a custom-made bioreactor (a device that contains and supports an engineered biological environment) situated at and as the head of a Perspex figure in the shape of a body, with hat and gown. In each of the diamond shapes comprising the figure was embedded a petri dish containing fixed (meaning dead and preserved) cells and across which were

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projected images and recordings of living cells, including those growing in the adjacent bioreactor (ORLAN 2008: 84). In this way, the cells were animated by these projections and those being cultured live in the piece were made visible to the audience. As with O’Reilly’s residency, the process and findings along the way are of interest here for what they suggest about specimenhood in the twenty-first century, rather than the finished outcome in the form of the installation, and about which much has already been written.8 In the process of self-experimenting with cellular hybridity, ORLAN needed to identify and obtain other cells for use in the bioreactor. Some of them came from ‘an animal leftover within the context of scientific research’ conducted in SymbioticA’s home department and were marsupial cells (ORLAN 2008: 84). She also found herself engaging with the commercial biobank, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), from where researchers can purchase a range of biological and microbiological materials, and cell lines.9 The company has an extensive online catalogue of their holdings, all classified into sections and sub-sections, and fully searchable, a site to which ORLAN turned her attentions. In searching for cells, she decided to exclude any that were older than her, any that had been banked for reasons of disease or pathology and any male cells (Hallensleben and Hauser 2010: 145). With this list of exclusions materialized some surprising and unexpected ways of cataloguing biomatter, including that of gender, which ORLAN found arresting. Deliberately questioning the classification system, she eventually settled on ‘WS1 type skin fibroblast cells [found in connective tissues] from a 12-week-old female foetus of African origin’ because she ‘found it striking that gender and “black” ethnicity were considered vital scientific criteria for cells in their catalogue’ (ORLAN 2008: 84). Tissue banks, such as the ATCC, are now significant institutions in global networks exchanging and trading in biological matter. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has defined tissue banks as either dealing with ‘fresh tissue’ or ‘maintaining collections of preserved tissue’, as well as noting a key difference between those that ‘supply tissue primarily for therapy’ and those that provide only for research purposes. The ATCC, as an example, stores preserved tissue and sells it for use only in research. Finally, banks can simply store tissues for researchers and surgeons to access material when required, or they can deploy more deliberative strategies for their collections and

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distribution (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995: 29). In the UK, all tissue banks are established on a not-for-profit basis, as opposed to commercial examples elsewhere, such as the ATCC. Thus, these banks represent the complex processes and technologies involved in harvesting, storing, maintaining and distributing tissue, which exceed the relatively straightforward transit between organ donors and recipients. In many ways, the transplantation of whole organs is based on a one-to-one relationship, with fewer intermediaries or interventions, as the organ moves from one body to another as rapidly as possible. Tissue donation and banking, however, create ‘a complex network of donor-recipient relations heavily mediated by biotechnical processes and an institutional complex of tissue banks, pharmaceutical and research companies, and clinics’ (Walby and Mitchell 2006: 22). As a technical institution, the ATCC collects commercially useful bioresources and incorporates them into their tissue stores through the application of work and skill to that matter. The res nullius of biological material is manipulated and processed in ways that ‘disentangl[e] human tissues from the network of embodied social relations in which they originate’ (Walby and Mitchell 2006: 69). In other words, organizations such as tissue banks must detach their incoming resource from their donors and this happens in several ways, according to Waldby and Mitchell. First, informed consent initiates that separation between donor and specimen material through providing authorized and knowing approval for retrieval, preservation and research. For the donor, the provision of consent severs the tie between body part and self and confers rights of ownership elsewhere. Following acquisition, tissue banks, such as the ATCC, then often transform tissues into cell lines that can be ‘standardized, stored, divided, multiplied, and transported throughout the world’ (Walby and Mitchell 2006: 73). At this point, the remaining links between donor and tissue are removed as cell lines are anonymized and scientifically classified. The tissue finally becomes the legal and intellectual property of the company, as the biological material is transmuted through scientific application and intervention. This efficiently transformative work by the company can be identified in the cells that ORLAN selected; the ATCC catalogue still lists these cells for purchase, naming them as ‘normal’, of ‘twelveweek gestation’, ‘female’ and of ‘black’ ethnicity. They were ‘derived

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from normal human skin by R. J. Hay’, who was also the ‘depositor’, and cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen in the biobank (ATCC: online). The ‘disentanglement’ between donor – the mother in this case – and her foetus is complete and visible in this objective and disinterested cataloguing. The only person worthy of note in the catalogue entry is the scientist who acquired and deposited the skin cells, making this resonate very strongly with the acquisition of specimens for medical museums and collections prior to the second half of the twentieth century. In the majority of these cases, the identity and history of the ‘donating’ individual were erased, whilst the name of the surgeon or medic who ‘collected’ the specimen was dutifully recorded and could even add significant value to the material. ORLAN’s practice, in drawing attention to this list of specimen features, pointed towards this deliberate and clinical alienation between the context of donation and the resultant cells for sale in an online database. For her audience, this might be all the more uncomfortable because these are foetal cells, divorced from parental care, perpetuated in a laboratory and commodified for research purposes. What appears shocking to a lay audience about the list of cell characteristics, being so detached and dispassionate, is seemingly standard practice for tissue bank catalogues, however. This gap between scientific categorization and more empathic approaches to specimens indicates the very different values attached to tissue and specimens in their different contexts. Such values are ‘always contingent on the particular cultural, ontological, epistemological, and historical significance that they have for different actors in the various tissue economies’ (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 34). This means that they are often contested materials as different values attach and take priority, as tissues circulate between bodies and institutions (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 34). Much recent feminist scholarship concerned with biomedicine, bioethics and medical sociology has focused on women’s bodies, labour and rights in the face of the creeping and persistent commercialization of reproductive tissues (such as ova for stem cell research and umbilical cord blood). Dickenson argues that this increasing commodification affects all bodies, ‘feminizing’ everyone in the search for new resources and markets for biomatter (Dickenson 2007: 24). But it remains the case that women are a particularly rich resource for their reproductive capacities, with pressure on female bodies increasing as science identifies further innovative potential

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in embryonic and reproductive tissues. A critical concern in this scholarship is the position of women as donors and sources of this material, and their current devaluation as such. As we have already noted, this is enabled by the logic of the Lockean principle of ‘no property in the body’, whereby the originator of the tissue has no rights over their separated parts, in favour of the application of skill to that matter within the clinic or laboratory that then creates rights for the recipient-scientist-biotech company. This means that ‘tissue donors are effectively open sources of biological material, which can be readily disentangled in ways that favour the rights and profits of biotechnology companies’ (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 76). Such thorough disentanglement in the tissue bank catalogue negates the female and any kind of social or kin network surrounding the foetus. It also obscures ‘the emotional, financial and physical labor performed by the donor’, which can be substantial and significant (Waldby and Mitchell 2006: 75). The origins of the specimen are rendered invisible and irrelevant to the onward life and potential of these foetal skin cells; in Dickenson’s words, ‘the lady vanishes’ (Dickenson 2007: 58). ORLAN’s interest in the ATCC catalogue is sparked by its specific classifications of the cells by gender and black ethnicity, which she expressed surprise at. Why would cells need to be identified in these ways? Gender appears to be a euphemism for sex in the catalogue if gender is accepted as a social construct, rather than being biologically determined. In fact, the sex of the cells is what is described – with ‘female’, rather than the gendered term ‘feminine’ being applied. It is well established in genetics that chromosomes determine sex characteristics and most human cells contain them as part of their DNA. Further differentiation has been located in the two X chromosomes of females and the XY chromosomal composition of males, making it less surprising that this cell line is differentiated by sex. The classification by ‘ethnicity’ is, however, a much more complex and contested area within genetic research and it might well give pause for thought. One of the hopes and ambitions for the Human Genome Project, operational through the 1990s, was that it would finally dispel racial categories through showing that they have no biological basis. The troubled relationship between science and race could be severed, once and for all, and this in turn would have social and cultural ramifications towards eradicating racism.

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Whilst the rejection of race has been a position occupied by some scientists since the decoding of the human genome (completed in 2003), there has also been something of a surprising renewal of interest in these categories, as a means of distinguishing between ‘donors who represent a range of human variation’ (Foster and Sharp 2002: 845). Without available biological categories, researchers often rely on already existing social categories, ‘such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and geographic locality’ to operate as proxies. These can assist in organizing genomic resources and planning targeted research projects but can simultaneously imply ‘substantive biological significance that racial and ethnic classifications do not necessarily possess’ (Foster and Sharp 2002: 845). Arguments for maintaining such socially constructed categories, when they are scientifically irrelevant, include the importance of developing population-specific drugs and treatments, and avoidance of discrimination and stigmatization by ensuring that particular groups are represented in research and trials. Nikolas Rose reflects on these debates and suggests that ‘race now signifies an unstable space of ambivalence between the molecular level of the genome and cell, and the molar level of classifications in terms of population group, country of origin, cultural diversity, and self-perception’. He goes on to claim that it is ‘in this new space of ambivalence that a new genomic and molecular biopolitics of race, health, and life is taking shape’ (Rose 2007: 161). The presence of this unstable category of ‘ethnicity’ in the ATCC catalogue indicates the continued use and prevalence of social classificatory schemes in scientific research, particularly in relation to biomedicine and genomics, and certainly does not point towards their imminent demise in these arenas. It seems that ‘ethnicity’, as for the term gender, is also a euphemism in the scheme, deployed to avoid some of the negative associations that ‘race’ might engender in relation to science and eugenics (Foster and Sharp 2002: 845). ORLAN’s selection of the black foetus for her bioart installation raised a number of important and unanswered questions relating to the political economy of specimens, their value in differing contexts and the practices that enable them to circulate as biocapital in the twenty-first century. Whilst audiences were not offered further insights into these issues, they were pinpointed for reflection through a simple relay of the biobank’s classificatory system. The list does make visible the dissociation between foetus and maternal body and also identified the political ambiguity of race,

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in Rose’s terms, in the current biopolitical milieu. Was the foetus ‘harvested’ for particular characteristics and in what context? The imagined scenarios of donation make this a discomfiting prospect. Both ORLAN’s and O’Reilly’s self-experiments engage with specimenhood at the forefront of biomedicine, in terms of using tissue  culturing in attempts to re-think the boundaries and constitution of the self. In both practices, this meant exploring the incorporation of others, non-human and human, into their in vitro selves and in so doing they unexpectedly revealed the inherent tensions involved in utilizing the matter of others in the laboratory – a distinctly political realm. Contrary to the teleological trajectory of heroic self-experimentation by male scientists, their work incorporates failed ambitions, a focus on process and a productive reflexivity concerning the context of their tests, and their wider social and political resonances. Undertaking embodied biotechnical work enabled them to reveal profound ontological, epistemological and ethical questions that concern everyone; ‘[c]apital today needs subjectivities; it depends on them’ and is thus voraciously extending its ‘pillage of life’ to create new markets and speculative opportunities (Hardt and Negri 2017: 28). As Judith Butler (2004) has argued, this means that some lives are increasingly privileged and protected, whilst others are made increasingly precarious and vulnerable, and none more so than in the biopolitical realm, where certain bodies and specimens remain particularly fragile and exploited. Posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has sought to extend Foucault’s work on biopolitics into analysis of advanced capitalism by ‘push[ing] the logic of the biopolitical beyond anthropocentrism and pay[ing] renewed attention to the necropolitical dimensions of the politics of “Life”’ (Braidotti 2016: 30). In her essay on ‘Posthuman Affirmative Ethics’, she also refers to the work of Cooper and Walby, to consider ‘bio-labour’ and how that includes the creation of a new underclass of exploited workers, clearly identifiable as ‘sexualized and racialized others’. Such bio-labour covers a range of globalized economies, such as surrogacy, sex-work, organ transplants, reproductive practices, pharmaceutical trials and biobanking that combine ‘high-tech advances and low-life survival’ (Braidotti 2016: 42). Braidotti asserts that these biopolitical power relations are both discriminatory and racist, producing a whole section of the global population whose bodies are disposable. As shown in the self-experimental performance work of ORLAN and

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O’Reilly, these bodies belong to those who ‘signify difference’; in other words, those who are ‘wom[e]n and LGBT; indigenous or native; animal, earth, or natural “others”’ (Braidotti 2016: 46). These are the precarious specimens of contemporary capitalism, deliberately re-entangled in social and cultural networks through these bioart practices.

6 Future Specimens

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, specimenhood is increasingly being shaped by genetic research, initiated in the life sciences in the 1950s with the discovery of DNA. Since then, conceptions of subjectivity have been shifting to include the molecular level of being, as biomedicine continues to work with the biological components of ‘life itself’, in the form of cells and genes. With the decoding of the human genome completed in the first years of the twenty-first century, this attention to the cellular seems to be focusing and accelerating, with almost daily reports of new genetic insights, breakthroughs and therapies. The significance and potential of genetic research have fostered a global network of research institutes, laboratories, databases, biobanks and scientists across the public and private sectors, making molecular biology and biotechnology big business enterprises. As the materials, technologies and techniques involved have become better understood, they have been made more efficient and competitive, and so they have become more widely available, to the point where genetic testing has begun to emerge from the rarefied spaces of medical establishments into the commercial marketplace. Where molecular specimenhood might have only previously been encountered in relation to highly specific and personal disease management, as a patient within the medical sphere undergoing particular tests and treatments, some forms of genetic testing are now commercially available to everyone. This represents a profound alteration in ontological understandings of the self, with identity now proposed and formulated at the cellular, invisible level and having a series of consequences affecting society, politics, law, medicine and culture, including the theatre. The chapter will

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consider the ways that theatre can make visible the invisible nature of genetics in terms of representational strategies and what theatre can offer to contemporary debates around genetic specimenhood and emergent versions of subjectivity that include these molecular understandings. But, first, it is important to clarify this idea of genetic specimenhood within wider society and to consider how it is impacting on perceptions of the self. Genetic testing in the form of genealogy DNA analysis is becoming more popular in the UK at this time, showcasing personalized molecular biology as affordable and relevant to everyone. Such tests are now being advertised in the UK on mainstream television and, in December 2018, as a Christmas gift for those curious about themselves. One of the more established companies in this emergent sector is 23andMe, its name referring to the twenty-three chromosomes in each cell in the human body, which sells a basic ancestry service for £54 (about $70) and a more comprehensive analysis for £104 (about $133) (at special festive discounts).1 Each client simply provides a saliva sample, sending it through the post to the company, which undertakes the genetic investigation and which provides the results electronically. Depending on the level of service purchased, the results can include reports on ancestry, potential genetic health risks (such as for age-related macular degeneration and celiac disease) and wellness (a category that includes caffeine consumption and muscle composition, for example), in addition to carrier status alerts (such as for cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia) and traits reports (which cover such things as cleft chin, freckles, hair texture and wake-up time). Their tagline is ‘welcome to you’, suggesting, through its use of a form of greeting, that the client will encounter new information about themselves, even that they are about to meet themselves as a  stranger, an encounter that will be positive and exciting. It implies the  provision of revelations about the self that until this point have been unknown and unknowable. The results will be truthful, grounded as they are in one’s biology and so scientifically discoverable within cells and chromosomes. What the client thinks that they know about themselves pre-testing is made to seem partial and incomplete, as though the results will divulge a more extensive, definitive and real self. This whole discourse, therefore, establishes innovative and highly commodifiable ways of constructing subjectivity that are based on microscopic and genetic forms, rather

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than on more visible, lived kinship and social networks, traits and behaviours. It effectively ties selfhood to essentialist notions of being innately biological, fixed and knowable, via the intervention of science and medicine, even though the results themselves are highly contingent. For instance, each test’s fostering of such biological essentialism in relation to ancestry can ‘obscure the important fact that the “boundaries” between social groups are highly fluid and that most genetic variation exists within all social groups – not between them’ (Foster and Sharp 2002: 848, emphasis in original). With the arrival of commercial DNA testing on the high street, it is clear that genetics has become part of quotidian experience and knowledge, emphasizing the ubiquity of this biomedical technology across all social spheres. At the end of the twentieth century, new media scholar José van Dijck wrote that genetics affects ‘virtually all aspects of life – manufacturing, business, law, politics and the entertainment industry’, and that it was already an integral part of ‘everyday practices’ (Dijck 1998: 2). In the public realm, genetics has been established as the final arbiter of truth about human origins and identity. DNA offers an apparently unique, verifiable and incontrovertible proof of biological selfhood, parentage and heredity, an opinion reinforced by the first successful use of DNA profiling in a murder case in Leicestershire, England, in 1984. Blood found on the murder victims, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, was genetically compared with over 5,000 voluntary subjects from the local community, a process that resulted in the eventual apprehension and conviction of the culprit, Colin Pitchfork. DNA testing has since become commonplace in forensic investigation and has helped to solidify the notion of its infallibility as a marker of individual identity in public and, indeed, legal perception. Subjects have become detectable, identifiable and knowable through their own exclusive genetic code, even as the likelihood of each individual recognizing their own data remains extremely remote. Biological matter, such as blood and saliva, the wet, organic stuff of life, is transformed into information that is decipherable by scientific technologies, and thus opens a strange gap between embodiment and renderings of that lived experience into computer codes and sequences. Media studies academic Eugene Thacker has noted this tension within molecular biology and biotech operations, where ‘biology is information, and information is immaterial

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and material’ (Thacker 2005: 11). Far from promoting an idea that biology is not natural, ‘it is a primary strategy of the biotech industry to insist on this dual aspect of “life itself”: biology is at once the “stuff of life” and essentially informatic’ (Thacker 2005: 48). This means that DNA profiling or genealogical DNA test results, for instance, come ‘to supplement or even to stand in for the subject’; the self becomes known through an informatic proxy that is derived from flesh and tissue but transformed into dry code (Thacker 2005: 48). Specimenhood in the twenty-first century is therefore supplemented and can even be supplanted by molecular biology reproduced as data. With genetic data increasingly supplementing and supplanting the subject, it means that Foucault’s idea of the biopolitical subject being managed within certain kinds of visual economies no longer holds. Rose Braidotti argues that ‘the political representation of embodied subjects … is no longer visual in the sense of being scopic … nor is it specular’ (Braidotti 2008: 179). Instead, she suggests that the representation of embodied subjects has become spectral: the body is represented as a self-replicating system that is caught in a visual economy of endless circulation. The contemporary social imaginary is immersed in this logic of boundless circulation and thus is suspended somewhere beyond the life-and-death cycle of the imaged self. Consequently, the social imaginary, led by genetics, has become forensic in its quest for traces of a life that it no longer controls. Contemporary embodied subjects have to be accounted for in terms of their surplus value as genetic containers, on the one hand, and as visual commodities circulating in a global circuit of cash flow, on the other hand. (Braidotti 2008: 179) Capital itself has become spectral in Braidotti’s analysis and that the ‘gaze is forensic’, suggestive of seeking scientific ideas of truth through access to interiority (Braidotti 2008: 179). These factors are played out at Foucault’s biopolitical levels of population and individuals, through biotechnologies that manage groups of people via information, through diets and pharmacology, for instance, and through personal regimes of self-care (Braidotti 2008: 179). Each disciplinary practice is developing through and becoming

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more dependent upon the transformation of cellular matter into algorithmic information that can be turned to managing bodies. Specimenhood is downscaling to the microscopic, atomizing the body still further until it disappears into fluids and tissues, codes and cells. It is like an extreme close-up that obliterates the whole in favour of miniscule parts and, in zooming in, reveals a number of ambiguities. The self, viewed forensically, is increasingly individualized and essentialized at the genetic level. DNA supposedly verifies an individual through unique biological markers that are only replicated across twins. From narratives around genealogical testing, however, it is also clear that many are seduced by its potential to situate oneself within wider kin networks and communities based on ancestry. This technology can, therefore, identify the individual as separate but intrinsically connected to others. Similarities with certain communities become key, whilst also defining differences and exclusions from others, to the point where such interest in population groups ‘has the potential to create, reinforce and/or aggravate social and ethical issues surrounding, for example, matters of self-identification, group representation, equality, stigmatization, discrimination and resource distribution’ (Smart et al. 2012: 30). DNA seems to more clearly define a sense of self-identity whilst also flagging one’s interconnectedness with certain others. At the same time, this turn towards knowing the genetic self destabilizes the idea of the sovereign, autonomous subject who is defined through being a bounded, observable entity, by suggesting that visible bodily surfaces, even anatomically, only provide a partial and incomplete picture. Molecular te ipsum (know yourself) provides more definitive, deep biological knowledge, which may reveal contradictory information to that gleaned from embodiment and experience. The genetic specimen, revealed through DNA tests, is assumed to be fixed, accurate and reliable, whilst having the capacity to simultaneously problematize identity by demonstrating its socially constructed precarity. Personal histories and kinship relations might be undermined by genetic information. Taken as the final arbiter in relation to parentage and identity, DNA’s presumed authenticity and authority can also be overplayed and overestimated, with profound consequences in legal, medical and social terms.

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The chimeric specimen: Stein Holum Projects’ Chimera A case in point in relation to such genetic quandaries is the chimeric specimen, named after the figure of the chimera from ancient Greek mythology. A female monster, capable of breathing fire, she was composed of a lion for the head and forelimbs, a goat for her body and ending in a dragon’s or snake’s tail. A formidable mixture of strength, cunning and wisdom, the chimera was a patchwork beast created from a fusion of identities, making the idea of the chimera applicable to other spheres of merged subjects. Medicine, for instance, has adopted the term to define anyone who has ‘two or  more populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes’ (Wolinsky 2007: 212). Such medical chimeras differ from hybrids in that the additional cell populations are only located in certain parts of the body, rather than in every cell, as in the case of hybrids. Chimerism is possible through ‘transplantation, transfusion or transfer of foetal cells into the circulation of the mother, but most frequently … occurs spontaneously during embryogenesis [the process of embryo development]’ (Wolinsky 2007: 212). Some researchers believe that spontaneous human chimeras – those that are the result of a vanished twin during embryogenesis – account for a significant proportion of the population but most people never become aware of the condition. Only manifesting itself through genetic testing, chimerism does not usually produce pathologies and, therefore, goes undetected. Even though chimerism is a named and medically recognized condition, the dominant narrative of each subject having only one set of genetic markers is pervasive, even within scientific and legal circles, to the point where if alternative possibilities are revealed they have been, at least initially, rejected as evidence of faulty DNA tests or they are taken to imply that an individual is fabricating their familial relations and even about the parentage of their children. In the face of DNA evidence that risks destabilizing normative understandings of reproduction and the idea of the singularity of the individual, doubt has repeatedly first been cast on the individual, rather than on the idea that DNA might be misleading or only providing partial information. In other words, when genetic information does not tally with the subject’s ancestral

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‘story’, the subject must have got their facts wrong: DNA does not lie. Recent legal cases, focused on kinship and maternity, reflect this resistance to the idea that genetic information can be incomplete or incorrect, and the cases have specifically implicated the mother as the source of the problem – she must be fabricating her position as a mother and involved in surrogacy or fraud if the DNA does not match her maternal narrative. The fantastical Chimera is female and the most common form of human chimerism occurs during pregnancy, positioning this condition as overwhelmingly connected to the female and her body. As this book has suggested, the female body has long been a specimen of particular interest for its reproductive capacities. Whilst the male anatomy has routinely been considered as the norm and standard against which to measure all others, the female, presenting with her unique generative physiology, has been a prized specimen in medical terms, especially when pregnant. Such interest in the female body has been tinged by worries about its apparently secretive nature. Given the complexity of generation, its occurrence within the female and thus its invisibility, women’s trustworthiness and integrity have been at stake since at least the fifteenth century in relation to their bodies.2 Katherine Park argues that in early modern Italy, for instance, ‘[t]he precarious nature of fatherhood, and thus of the family itself, centred on the uterus, the dark, inaccessible place’ (Park 2010: 25). Society fretted about paternity, about virginity, about the sex of unborn children, about the inability to conceive, and anomalous pregnancies and births, and all of which pointed towards the maternal figure as the key, the source and, inevitably, the problem (Park 2010: 26). Fears that women withheld vital information or only shared it amongst themselves regarding their bodies and childbirth were underpinned by a general sense of inaccessibility, suggesting the reason ‘why the womb appears as a – arguably the – privileged object of dissection in medical objects and texts’ in the early modern period (Park 2010: 26, emphasis in original). The idea of the secret female body is present in the wax anatomical model (considered in Chapter 1), where the ‘secret’ can be accessed through the figure being demountable. The layers of anatomy can be peeled away to reveal the foetus hidden within the body, a feature entirely missing from male waxes, whose bodies contain no such dangerous enigmas and therefore require no equivalent excavation.

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The first section of this chapter will analyse a theatre piece that engaged with the chimeric body in terms of motherhood, through a focus on the 2014 play Chimera. To provide some necessary context, the work deals with ‘tetragametic chimerism’, which came to public notice in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a result of two particular cases in the United States. It refers to a specific type of chimerism, which ‘occurs through the fertilization of two ova by two spermatozoa, followed by the fusion of the zygotes and the development of an organism with intermingled cell lines’ (Yu et al. 2002: 1545). In other words, during embryogenesis, one twin absorbs the other in the womb, and so maintains two sets of genetically distinct cells within a single body. It is estimated that ‘about one in eight of everybody walking around is a twin who was born single’ but it might only become known when some kind of genetic testing is undertaken, for instance for transplant compatibility or in paternity cases (Wolinsky 2007: 212). The play Chimera, created by Stein Holum Projects and staged at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, London, in 2014, is based on a real-life story about such a paternity case in the United States that eventually revealed that the mother in the case had tetragametic chimerism. In Washington in 2002, Lydia Fairchild, a white woman married to an African American man, applied for welfare support for her young family. The standard procedure in such an application is for DNA screening to be undertaken to confirm parentage, which revealed that the father was a match for Fairchild’s children, but that Fairchild herself was not the mother. As Norton and Zehner argue, ‘the “legitimate” mother … is … the person who can display that her DNA forms a match with her children’s. The result is a specific type of motherhood that is defined through seemingly fixed and lawlike biological attributes’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 113). Fairchild was accused of welfare fraud and sent to court to determine parentage and, ultimately, to decide on appropriate custody of her children. Because of the apparent strength of the DNA evidence she was unable to find legal representation, reinforcing social perceptions that DNA provides incontrovertible proof of personhood and kin relations. Fairchild being pregnant at the time of the case meant that the judge appointed a witness to the birth and then requested further DNA tests on the newborn and Fairchild. These came back similarly negative and the assumption was that she was acting as a surrogate (Norton and Zehner 2008: 109).

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Just prior to Fairchild’s case, in Boston, another woman, Karen Keegan, required a kidney transplant and so was similarly screened to try to identify a compatible donor, including her children. Her results indicated that two of her children were hers, but one was not. It is evident that Keegan was treated rather differently from Fairchild; as a middle-class white woman, Keegan ‘attracted the attention of a physician at the National Institutes of Health’ and was offered the opportunity to have researchers examine her case, rather than being confronted with an allegation of fraud and the possibility of losing custody of her children (Norton and Zehner 2008: 108). The team undertook genetic testing which revealed that Keegan was a tetragametic chimera, with some of her organs and tissues having one set of DNA and others having a completely different, second profile. The case and the results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2002, which drew the attention of an attorney in the Fairchild case. The results were used as part of Fairchild’s trial, indicating that there was a possibility that Fairchild had the same condition, and resulting in her being granted ‘official motherhood of her children’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 108). She went on to undergo further genetic testing and her tetragametic chimeric status was confirmed. Both women’s actions in undergoing further tests ‘serve[d] to patch the cracks formed in the genetic foundation of kinships and to restore the related science to a now stronger position as the legitimate arbiter of motherhood’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 114). Chimera, the play, is loosely based on the case of Fairchild and represents a mother, Jennifer Samuels, who is a microbiologist. Samuels undertakes her own genetic testing when her eight-yearold son, Brian, is diagnosed with a benign functional heart murmur. As an inherited condition, Samuel is curious about whether it was passed from father to son or from mother to son, and surprised that they should only discover this now. She undertakes DNA testing on her family, firstly taking a DNA sample from her husband, Richard, and when this comes back negative, testing herself. The first result is also negative and, believing that ‘DNA’s the key’, she goes on to test all different parts of herself, comparing those results with Brian’s (Stein and Holum 2014: 34, emphasis in original). This is the moment when their DNA mismatch is revealed, and Samuels is stunned to find that ‘[s]omething’s not right. Something’s going on – inside’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 36). It is Brian, the

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son, who then explains to the audience that Samuels is a medical chimera, that she was a twin in her mother’s womb and her twin was absorbed into Samuel’s body during embryogenesis, but left traces of the other in some of her organs and tissues. As the narrator figure says in the play, this secondary DNA is from the ‘sister she ate up like so much cake. This is the sister who got gobbled and swallowed and absorbed. This is the one who colonized her eggs. This is the one who is the genetic mother of Brian’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 41–2). She tells Brian that ‘you are, genetically speaking, not my son. You’re my nephew’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 43). The play gently explores this moment of revelation and what it might mean for a mother, when everything she thought she knew about her child, biologically and maternally, is seemingly overturned by genetic evidence. In the real-life cases in America, both mothers articulated their sense of subjective turmoil in the face of the DNA results that undermined their own knowledge and experience of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Even those who had witnessed the birth of Fairchild’s children, medics who had known the family and cared for them in hospital were cast aside as unreliable in the face of the genetic evidence. Norton and Zehner note that ‘mothers are forced to wait in a fractured state until a scientific explanation can sweep up the pieces, reassemble them in a novel way and ultimately reaffirm the utility of science as a purveyor of truth’ (2008: 121). In the play, unable to cope with the consequences of discovering that her son is in fact her unborn sister’s offspring and the feeling that she has somehow damaged Brian, Samuels leaves the family home. What the play, and indeed the original cases in America, reinforces is the assumption that females, particularly in relation to childbirth, remain secretive and unreliable subjects. In the case of Lydia Fairchild, this was heightened to a level of pathologization that led to her being accused of criminal activity, such were the powerful intersections of gender, class and race in this instance that exacerbated assumptions about her duplicity. It is as medico-specimens that females can be deciphered and demystified in these understandings, through the application of rational scientific methods that reveal the truth of these bodies. There is then an acute process of gendered authorizing and domination at work here, where medico-legal instruments and practices are brought to bear on the female in order to control their pathological bodies and to reveal their hidden realities.

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Anna Harpin, in her work on madness and representation, argues that this kind of model ‘understands such bodies as simply confessional and readable (therefore knowable and treatable)’ (Harpin 2018: 167). Narratives of dubious female intent and deception versus scientific veracity and transparency view the female body as a site of truthfulness, if ‘made to speak’ in certain ways (Harpin 2018: 167). This ‘speaking’ is very much articulated through biotechnologies that mediate the body, whilst the actual female voice and subjectivity are dismissed and silenced. Women, such as Fairchild, talking about their embodied experiences of knowing childbirth, of knowing their sexual partners and fidelity, are not permitted to fulfil the burden of proof but their bodies can, when put to the test. Samuels confronts this painful dichotomy as she exposes the gap between being a mother and a microbiologist, acknowledging her subjective experience of childbirth on the one hand – ‘I would know if I was his mother, I mean, obviously, I was there’ – and, on the other, dealing with the perceived incontrovertibility of the genetic results that she collates and which eventually lead to her departure (Stein and Holum 2014: 36). Braidotti’s idea of spectral subjectivity here usurps the experiential and embodied experience of motherhood. The fact that Samuels, Fairchild and Keegan, in reality and fiction, carried their babies, gave birth to them and nurtured them is cast aside, revealing that genetic testing ‘in part structures our concept of what motherhood is’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 109). Such medico-legal precedents that silence ‘the individual while privileging the medical knowledge and expertise that confesses on their behalf’ suggest, to Norton and Zehner, analogies with the treatment of transgender parents (Norton and Zehner 2008: 119). They make the point that courts in the United States have often acted against transgender parents, even when they ‘are genetically related to their children … because they do not conform to societal standards of parenthood that insist on correspondence between sex assigned at birth and gender expression or identity’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 119, emphasis in original). Chimera finds these tensions, between the subjective experience of motherhood, the ontological questions raised by genetics and social narratives around the duplicitous and monstrous mother, difficult to resolve. Jennifer Samuels thinks of herself as monstrous and damaging to her son, absorbing and reflecting social assumptions and expectations around maternal obligations and ties. Whilst the

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play raises interesting questions about the politics of identity in the face of tetragametic chimerism, Samuels does not escape the feeling that she is a failed mother and sister, and the sense that she is not who she thought she was. Her son has been born with a heart defect; in genetic terms, Samuels is not his mother; she dominated and absorbed her twin sister in the womb; and, she still contains that sister in her DNA, meaning that ‘she will now never be alone’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 53). Both Brian and the coffee lady, as the narrator figure, try to ease and mitigate these effects by drawing attention to the complexities of identity and selfhood and other, more positive, renderings of ‘monsters’ and chimeras. The coffee lady, for instance, states that: ‘The problems we encounter in defining personhood nowadays are related to the fact that we have so many more facts now that our ability to philosophize and legally regulate them are woefully, dangerously behind the times […] What makes something a person?’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 52). Brian tells the audience of conjoined twins and relays the tale of a young girl in India born with two further arms and legs, and who was revered because people thought that she was the incarnation of ‘Lakshmi, the eight-limbed goddess in Hinduism’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 50). Doctors, however, thought she was ‘deformed, she’s a freak, we have to fix her’ and undertook extensive surgery to normalize her; ‘now all the people know she’s not a goddess’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 50–1). In the final scene, Brian makes a comparison between Samuels and such examples of extended personhood, where the self can be multiple. She ‘is a monster, a mythical beast’, who ends up heartbroken because of the irreconcilability of science and ‘feeling’, in these moments (Stein and Holum 2014: 59). As a scientist and a mother, Samuels finds these conflicts impossible to overcome, whilst Norton and Zehner rightly call for ‘alternative legal and medical frameworks that open more space to valuing lived experience over genetic codes’ (Norton and Zehner 2008: 122).

Representing genetic specimenhood As demonstrated by the trajectory of the specimens in this book, from whole bodies to parts to tissue cultures, this shift to the molecular constitution of life brings with it new and different forms

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of display and spectacularization of the body as medical object. The so-called genetic turn requires an engagement with microscopic aspects of the self – invisible to the naked eye – and therefore with mysterious and even fantastical parts of biology. In terms of the visibility of this specimenhood in science, popular culture and performance, genetics creates obvious problems due to its minute scale and complexity – how to show what cannot be seen? Visual artist ORLAN puts the difficulty thus in relation to bioart practice: it ‘confronts us with the bodily limits to visual perception, which is extremely limited when it comes to perceiving anything small. This represents the real challenge for artists accustomed to visual practices, and so it is a battle of giants to contrive to show something when there is nothing to see without a microscope’ (2008: 89). The pervasive genetic narrative of origins and how we are constituted by invisible structures are explored in Chimera through the use of digital technologies and through specific scenic devices. The whole play is set within Jennifer Samuel’s kitchen, described in the text as ‘a modern white kitchen. Stark white, a blank slate. This is both a kitchen and a theatre. Refrigerator, cabinets, a pantry, a sink centre stage. The sink has no faucets. A white window frame hangs above the sink’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 25). It doubles as her microbiology lab, where she undertakes her family’s DNA sampling and testing. At once domestic and clinical, with its clean surfaces and antiseptic appearance, there is an apparent transparency to the scenography, just as the human subject appears to be self-evident in its physical manifestation; everything is observable, without extraneous clutter. What cannot be seen, however, is the biological make-up of the individual, which in this case conceals a complex twinning of bodies, beyond that of the maternal split between mother and child. The invisible inside threatens to destabilize the surface integrity and assumptions about individuality. In the kitchen, this dialectic of the invisible and the visible is echoed in the way that the characters emerge from and disappear into the cupboards, fridge and sink. The insides, the carcasses, of the cupboards and the white goods are not what they seem – they contain surprises and other bodies. At the end of Scene Three, the coffee lady is consumed and disappeared by the sink, as she enters it head first, and Brian appears in the fridge in Scene Four to deliver his monologue on chimeras, for example. The analogy to Samuels’ body is clear, where the fleshy container conceals another, by turns surprising and frightening.

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In analysing the genetic turn in the cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jackie Stacey similarly identifies the ‘paradox’ involved in ‘the impossibility of seeing someone else’s genes despite the ubiquitous presence of genetic discourse’ (Stacey 2010: 11). In Chimera, the desire to see inside the body, forensically and at the cellular level, is explored through the use of projections, onto the set and the performer. The projections include the most iconic image of the double helix of DNA, which is the representational proxy for the gene and the ‘sign of vitality, immortality and the future’ (Stacey 2010: 5). It appears in the play when Samuels is undertaking her genetic testing; it is the object of her quest, her query and the supposed solution. It is the Sphinx-like riddle that needs solving (the Sphinx is the child or sibling of the mythological Chimera in some ancient tales) to determine the origins of Brian’s heart murmur and thus his biological genesis. It offers a version of the truth that will also be Samuels’ undoing and re-appears when she learns that she had a vanishing twin. As Stacey argues, such attempts to make the invisible visible are part of the desire of the ‘genetic imaginary … to secure identity as legible through screening technologies; and to anchor embodied difference by making it stable’ (Stacey 2010: 11). Projections are also used in the play to seemingly make the interior of bodies materialize in the space, through showing an x-ray of a heart that then starts to beat, the physiology of the performer’s arm in images of muscles and veins below her skin, and the viscera. Following Thacker, the material body is made immaterial as a series of digital images and codes in these scenes, which are then rematerialized on the body of the performer in projected form. This echoes the transit of biological matter in genomic research, from the organic to the informational and back to the body (Thacker 2005: 48). The revelation of what has been called the ‘transparent body’ is supposed to affirm our identity but, even as the inside is imaged and visualised, it confounds and troubles.3 The final use of projections in Chimera comes near the end of the piece, when the narrator, or coffee lady, talks about personhood with the audience. As she acknowledges that Samuels has decided to leave her family, images are layered over the body of the narrator, so that ‘her whole body is swallowed by projections of herself in all of her different costumes … The images are life-size and she strains to make herself seen, make herself heard, as her body and voice are doubled, tripled, refracted’ (Stein and Holum 2014: 53). This multiplicity is added to by numerous voices calling the name

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of ‘Jennifer Samuels’ at the same time, generating a cacophony of sound and image that layers, reproduces and copies the performer. If genetics offers ‘fantasies of predictability and control’, this digital technology in the play is used to undermine such desires, showing instead a specimen self that is fractured by genetic information and identity as an unstable category (Stacey 2010: 68). In this moment, Samuels/the coffee lady becomes fully spectral, a ‘body … represented as a self-replicating system that is caught in a visual economy of endless circulation’ (Braidotti 2008: 179). There is a final theatrical device at work in the play that underlines this idea of plurality in the self and the ‘multiplicity’ that ‘has now come to haunt not just the subject, but also previously sacred notions of the singularity of embodiment and of linear genealogy through the sanctity of heterosexuality and reproduction’ (Stacey 2010: 150). The play has just three characters: a host and narrator called the coffee lady, Jennifer Samuels and her son, Brian, who is represented as eight or nineteen years of age, depending on the scene. Instead of this being a three-hander though, all the characters are embodied by the actress Suli Holum, who adjusts costume, voice and physicality to capture their differences. This multiroling, where Holum represents both mother and son/nephew, and narrator, mimics the chimeric structure itself, of having multiple identities within an individual body. At the same time as chimerism destabilizes the myth of individual singularity, it is underpinned in the theatre production by this familiar use of multi-roling, where many characters are portrayed by a single performer. Importantly, it also resonates across the female body, in terms of both the character and the actor. The character of Samuels is revealed to be ‘both herself and not herself’ (Stacey 2010: 53). On the outside, she appears to be an obviously singular biological entity, but inside, in her invisible biological depths, she contains another. This other is brought forth in and through childbirth. Simultaneously, the others in the play, within its representational structures, are brought forth through mimesis, which resonates with the medical condition through analogy. Multiple selves emerge from the one performer, in a kind of theatrical chimerism. If, as theatre scholar Peggy Phelan argues, theatre is predicated on ‘a desire to experience a first cause, an origin, an authentic beginning’ (1993: 126), then genetics too has this same desire – it ‘promises absolute verification of … biological origins’ (Stacey 2010: 111). In the same way that theatre fails to

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deliver authenticity and origins because the ‘experience of origin is always already mimicry’, as Diamond claims (in Phelan 1993: 126), then genetics too has a paradox at its heart: ‘the more the body can be authenticated through genetic information, the less original it becomes’ (Stacey 2010: 111). For Stacey, genetics produces the body as ‘posthuman copy’ because of its incorporation of ‘previous incarnations’, as its ancestry is revealed; in other words, it too is a form of mimesis (Stacey 2010: 111). The geneticized specimen is multiple and queered in Stacey’s terms, and highlighted by chimerism, destabilizing as it does the model of dominant heterosexuality and the idea of the autonomous, singular individual. In summary, the medical and theatrical chimerism at the heart of this particular production radically disrupts normative understandings of identity, kinship and the myth of DNA as a means of providing unambiguous access to and confirmation of the individualized and originary self. Arguably, this becomes even more unsettled through the figure of the female and the mother, both in the real-life cases and the fictional world of Jennifer Samuels. The legal cases and the play serve to emphasize the precarious nature of motherhood as a social and legal construct that is underpinned by biomedical understandings and reinforcements.

Bloodlines A different form of chimerism was explored in the interdisciplinary piece Bloodlines (2013), which developed from the Science in Culture Research network in the UK, the Chimera Network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.4 Led by theatre maker and scholar Alex Mermikides, the work explored chimerism resulting from transplantation and specifically from a bone marrow transplant. In 2006, Mermikides’ brother became ill with a form of leukaemia, a life-threatening cancer of the white blood cells and only curable through a bone marrow transplant. Mermikides was a viable donor for her brother and the piece was a creative and interrogatory response to that experience of illness, donation and transplant. Milton Mermikides, Alex’s brother, was a co-investigator on the project and composed the soundscape. The project intended to explore collaborative practice between

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artists and scientists in the creation of new work and how science, its ‘data, understandings and perspectives’, might provoke that creative journey in innovative  directions (Mermikides 2013: online). In its development and performance, Mermikides worked with Dr Ann Van de Velde from University Hospital Antwerp, the Head of Haematology and an expert in blood disorders. The partnership allowed Mermikides to think about the role of the scientist in such collaborations, ‘beyond that of the fact-checker or “adviser”’ (Mermikides 2013: online). Because of the siblings’ personal experiences of transplantation, the project also questioned assumptions around the objectivity of science. Similarly to Chimera, the piece integrated the virtual with the embodied, but in order to explore the diagnosis and treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Operating as pedagogic device, metaphor, scenography and proxy, technology was foregrounded in  the show as intricately braided with medical expertise and practice, as well as the subjective experience of illness and transplant therapy. For the spectator, this invited new understandings about the co-constitutive nature of specimenhood, as well as reinforcing some of its intensely isolating and alienating features. The scientistconsultant (Dr Van de Velde) used technology in the opening sequence in a faux lecture format in order to define and explain ‘haematopoiesis’ – the biological process whereby haematopoietic stem cells become differentiated blood cells. She showed a complex diagram of cell lineages, for instance, in order to describe and illustrate each sort of blood cell and their purpose in the body. Here, the figure of the expert was separated from the patient and the audience, in order to convey scientific information that helped to elucidate the condition and its treatment. A gentle authority and clarity were asserted through the use of technical language, supported by the educational use of technology that translates complex processes into accessible and legible images. A little later in the piece, she returned to give the patient-dancer (Adam Kirkham) their diagnosis and treatment plan. Again, this utilized technical language but this time it appeared in a word cloud on the screen behind them, capturing the key words, such as ‘chemotherapy’ and ‘aggressive’. This subtly started to shift the focus from objective treatment data to the subjective experience of giving and receiving such information. The word cloud repeated some of the expert’s terminology but in a way that acknowledged the impact of that

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language, its force and affect, and how it might be remembered later, in a disjointed and inarticulate manner. At the same time, as the consultant started to provide this information, the patient and doctor shared poses, mirroring each other’s clutched hands, and subtle position changes, highlighting a degree of empathy and shared understanding, at least initially. As the seriousness of the condition became apparent, however, the dancer represented the personal impact of receiving such news physically, through using gestures like holding the head, recoiling from the words and bending over in self-protection. Here, doctor and patient diverged, as the specimen was framed as the one who must undergo dangerous therapies, risking death through disease and treatment, receiving the news as a series of brushes and blows to the body. The next sequence represented the treatment phase and staged the patient alone in his hospital bed, which was projected vertically onto the screen, for the dancer to lie against in an illusion of looking down onto the subject/patient. Technology cocooned the patient in an ambient soundscape made up of the dulled noises of a hospital ward, with its beeping technologies and distant voices. The patient positioned and re-positioned himself on the bed in a section that conveyed the passing of time during treatment, the repetition, the discomfort and boredom of being confined to bed, which was accompanied by the mapping of various physical changes and symptoms as they appeared. The projection of the bed adjusted to show the sheet, pillow and cover in multiple versions of order and disorder, enacting its own choreography of illness. This reinforced the sense of duration and distress in being bed-bound for a long period. Also imaged was some of the technological paraphernalia that surrounds the seriously ill patient – the intravenous drips and shunts that keep them medicated and monitored. The soundscape incorporated the alarms and beeps so familiar from hospital settings, the constant interface between the sick body and machinic intervention that is, hopefully, curative but also profoundly alienating. Ultimately, the feeling was one of isolation and monotony, punctuated by confusion, when the treatment, the drugs and the altered experience converge to disorient and discombobulate the patient. The sequence ended with the screening of a game of space invaders, metaphorically substituting for the destruction of the diseased cells in the body in order to prepare for the stem cell transplant. Every last ‘alien’ on the screen was obliterated.

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Several key elements of specimenhood coalesced in these images of illness, including: the surveillance and management of the body within the medico-scientific sphere; the separation of the specimen from the everyday and into the realm of the medical; the increasingly technologized aspects of specimens; the tensions between the subjective experience of being a specimen, and the objectivity and technicalities of science; and efforts to make the body transparent and legible. In Bloodlines, this transparency was focused on making the illness and treatment aesthetically readable for an audience. But this also raised the problem of representation that theatre and performance makers have to work through – how to convey the microscopic, the complexity of biology and the subjective experience of disease. Mermikides drew on collaborative and interdisciplinary means to deal with these problematics, through sound, movement, screening technologies and expert speech that encouraged empathy, feeling and understanding. It is in the final section of the piece that chimerism was tackled directly, as this was the moment in the chronological trajectory of the treatment when it featured. The chimeric specimenhood in this instance is acquired because of transplantation, rather than being a congenital form, such as that explored in Chimera. Milton Mermikides’ treatment involved the destruction of his own cells in his bone marrow, as represented by the game of space invaders, to be replaced with healthy ones from his sister in an allogeneic stem cell transplant. It meant that Milton became a chimera following the transplant, with two sets of DNA in his body. Perhaps subtler than organ transplantation, because less violent, stem cell transplants still adhere to the same logic of a kind of emptying of the donor and recipient, and then the replacement of tissues or cells with those from another.5 Alien biomatter is inserted into the recipient body, radically altering it in the process: ‘the other is both integrated within – and indeed essential to – the life of the self, while remaining irreducible to that self’ (Shildrick 2008: 40). This doubling was constructed in the work through a melding of dance and screen technology that allowed the dancer-patient to interact with a digital partner – the donor – projected into the stage space (see Figure 5). The scene returned to the dancer-patient in the projected hospital bed, but another now sat by the side, digitally appearing as part of the image. There followed a half-embodied, half-virtual duet

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FIGURE 5  Bloodlines by Chimera, performer Adam Kirkham, 2013.

on the bed, representing the chimeric intertwining of donor and recipient. The two differently constituted bodies overlapped, joined and separated through moves that mirrored, doubled, detached and touched each other. There were always two bodies but at times they became layered and complexly intermingled, making them harder to visually distinguish. The dancer-patient acknowledged and responded to this strange intimacy, moving his fingers as though testing his embodiment and sense of self, which was no longer quite so clear cut. The voice of Van de Velde spoke over the duet about the technical process of finding a compatible stem cell donor, whilst biological matter was dematerialized into bioinformatics as the screen was populated by numbers and letters, alone and in sequences, relating to leukocytes and genetic compatibility testing. Representing the necessity of chimeric-becoming for the patient, this process was shown to be both fascinating and extraordinary. In biological terms, the voiceover informed the audience that the possibility of finding an immuno-compatible match is 10 to the power of 23, which is improved to a 1-in-4 chance if the donor is a sibling. For the recipient, the embodied specimen, the transplant means the infiltration of the body by a biological migrant, transported from one body to the other via a blood transfusion machine. The donor

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duet emphasized this connection with and openness to the other that was also unsettling and unusual. The fantasy of the sovereign subject who is autonomous and self-contained is ruptured by this sudden dependency on another, by the need to share and assimilate physical make-up to sustain life and health. The piece suggested the inevitability of co-dependency in these moments, in order to overcome a lifethreatening illness, but also in terms of support and understanding, reflecting the shared nature of living. The final images of the piece included Van de Velde activating the heart of the patient-dancer to initiate a projected sequence of his cardiovascular system gradually illuminating throughout his body, as though mimicking the journey of the transplanted stem cells. It was a celebratory moment of revival, cure and beauty. The digital donor then re-appeared, doubled onto the body of the dancer, reminding the audience of the new chimeric status of this specimen self. The dancer finally disconnected from his double and they stood separately as the piece closed, with some projected text about the risks and potentials of haematopoietic stem cell transplants ending the work. In conclusion, both theatre pieces explored in this chapter interwove  technology with embodied specimenhood in order to represent genetic insights that impact on understandings of ourselves and our relations to others. Melding the digital with the embodied in these representations replicated genomic research and practice that works from the flesh, transforming it into information and then inserting those codes back into the flesh in a process of ‘informationali[sing] without demateriali[sing]’ (Thacker 2005: 11). The body and, by extension, the self are shown to be revealed by and known through such digital encodings which are a feature of contemporary mediated experience and of genetic imagery. In fact, the self can be displaced by such data, where it substitutes for the subject, and thereby radically alters perceptions of subjectivity, such as Jennifer Samuels was shown to experience. Use of screen technologies also conveys the apparent transparency and legibility of the biological, genetic self, whilst also confounding those notions through uses of doubling and layering of those images. Ideas of an originary and authentic selfhood shift as bodies are shown to be intertwined and capable of being multiple at the molecular level. These techniques suggest more complex and entwined versions of subjectivity that can be destabilizing but also enlivening.

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Both Chimera and Bloodlines, both drawn from real-life scenarios, focus attention on the complexity of genetic specimenhood through cases that challenge dominant and powerful discourses about genetic identity as a stable and discoverable fact. They offer resistances to problematic narratives that reduce selfhood to essentialist notions based on biological features and instead invite consideration of how individuals are interconnected and co-dependent in ways that exceed genetically identified networks. Both represent bodies that are or that become co-constituted, fracturing the idea of the autonomous self and suggesting the need to engage with more fluid and flexible notions of selfhood and subjectivity. Even as genomics promises deeper knowledge about ourselves in the future and increasingly varied forms of molecular specimenhood, these theatrical representations of chimeric lives and becomings reveal the need to re-evaluate those claims about essential selfhoods, in favour of more experiential and embodied knowledge about what connects people.

NOTES

Introduction 1 The following texts offer excellent introductions to freak shows: M. M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (2008); R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996). 2 The term ‘specimenhood’ that I am deploying here was coined by visual and cultural studies scholars Mara Gladstone and Janet Catherine Berlo, in an essay exploring museum ethics in relation to bodily displays (2011) and is explored in more detail in Chapter 1. 3 The first university to regulate dissections was the University of Montpellier which, from 1376, was annually granted the body of an executed criminal for dissection. This practice then spread to other major European cities over the next two centuries (Pouchelle 1990: 25). 4 See Richardson (1988) for an analysis of popular responses to dissection and the ensuing battles between surgeons and families over the criminal body, often played out at the foot of the gallows. 5 See Waldby (2000) for full details of this project and its connections with early modern dissection. 6 See Richardson (1988); Bailey (1991). 7 See the collection’s website for an image of this specimen and further details. Available online: http://collection.kunstkamera.ru (accessed 3 January 2018). 8 BBC programme details and further information are available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mv2jc (accessed 7 January 2019).

Chapter 1 1 See Petherbridge and Jordanova (1997) for an historical overview of the links between art and anatomy.

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https://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy/da_dream_part.html (accessed 4 May 2018). 3 A number of scholars have recently examined the work of eighteenth-century female wax modeller and dissector Anna Morandi Manzolini. For a full-length study, see Rebecca Messbarger’s The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (2010). 4 See Roberta Panzanelli’s edited collection Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculptures and the Human Figure (2008) for more on the historical use of wax. 5 See Joanna Ebenstein’s book The Anatomical Venus (2016) for a history and detailed analysis of these wax figures. 6 For a detailed insight into the construction of sexual difference through anatomy, see Thomas Lacquer’s seminal text Making Sex (1990). 7 An example of barely concealed erotic frisson is evident in the following notes from a museum visitor about the Anatomical Venus in 1797: ‘Under a glass cover, which is removable, in the first chamber, there is a beautiful female figure, in wax, of the size of life. Surprised as we were, at the workmanship of the external parts, how much more fearfully were we astonished, and how was our curiosity excited, when, after removing successively the outward membranes of the body, which are in different divisions, the entire structure of a pregnant woman was exhibited’ (Smollet in Maerker 2011: 54). 8 Anna Maerker’s book Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (2011) explores these aspects of spectatorial engagements with the models in more detail. 9 In brief, the process involves embalming the body in formaldehyde to stop decomposition, following which the dissection takes place. The body is then frozen and bodily fluids are replaced by acetone in a cold acetone bath, then fat molecules are replaced in a warm acetone bath. Finally, the acetone is extracted in a process of ‘forced impregnation’ and exchanged with plastic polymers. The body must then be positioned and is hardened and cured with silicone rubber (see von Hagens 2001: 20–30 for a more detailed description of the process). 10 Kőrperwelten means ‘Body Worlds’ and the first showing of the exhibition in the UK was housed in the Atlantis Gallery in Brick Lane, London, running from March 2002 until February 2003. It was estimated that by the time it came to London some 7 million people had visited the exhibition worldwide, making it a significant global cultural event. I saw the exhibition in Brussels (2001) and London (2002 and 2009). In 2018, there were five exhibitions still running,

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one in New Zealand, two in Germany, and two in the United States. At the start of 2019, a version of the show has returned to London. 11 I have written in more detail about this exhibition (Bouchard 2010: 50–7). 12 This practice is outlined in Roach (2003).

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See, for instance, science journalist Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), which was turned into a film, starring Oprah Winfrey, in 2017. An example of a theatre piece about Henrietta Lacks is Mira Dovreni’s play How to Be Immortal, which was staged by Penny Dreadful Productions and toured the UK in 2014. I have written about these issues previously in relation to work by artists Marissa Carnesky and Kira O’Reilly: Bouchard (2013). The Human Tissue Act, https://www.hta.gov.uk/policies/humantissue-act-2004 (accessed 24 May 2018). For further information, see O’Hanlon (1998). See, for example, Dickenson (2007); Fernandez Lynch et al. (2017); Wall (2015). See the United Nations’ page for the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/universaldeclaration-human-rights/ (accessed 6 July 2018).

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4

5

The programme can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ASTdECbRVkY (accessed 10 January 2019). The show has since been performed at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, in November 2013, and at The Lowry, Salford, in March 2016. See Bouchard (2009). Jennifer Doyle writes about the emotional difficulties some art produces in its spectators, including live art practices by Ron Athey, for instance. This raises alternate questions about what it means to be ‘too close’ in emotional terms. See Doyle (2013). For more on the histories and relations between Empire, race and science, see, for example, Blanchard et al. (2008).

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6

The idea of the ‘extraordinary body’ here comes from the work of Rosemarie Garland Thomson in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996). 7 Fraser’s 2001 solo piece Sealo: Freak, for example, explored the life of Stanley Berant, a freak show performer in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. 8 A version of the lecture, staged at the Museum Association’s Conference in 2014, is available to view here: https://vimeo .com/110346267 (accessed 31 August 2018). 9 See Sandell, Dodd and Garland Thomson (2010) for an overview of this work in the contemporary museum from around the world. 10 There is archival footage available of Pynor talking about her work and this piece at the University of Liverpool available to view here: https://vimeo.com/97139149 (accessed 4 October 2018). 11 The full details of the actions, chemicals and timings are recorded by Pynor in ‘On the Emergent Properties of Death’ (2016: 173–89).

Chapter 4 1

For O’Brien, ‘sickness’ is a politicized term and I am deploying it here in the same way.

Chapter 5 1

2 3 4 5

See the company’s website for further information, although this is limited by the need to pay a subscription to see the full range of content and participate in the online discussions: http://quantifiedself .com/about/ (accessed 8 November 2018). See Curtis and Hargreaves (2018) for an extensive study of O’Reilly’s work. See SymbioticA’s website for further information and a full list of their previous residencies: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au (accessed 12 November 2018). I have written about this work previously in relation to skin and issues of consent in the following publication: Bouchard (2013). See, for instance, the work of the Tissue Culture and Art project, closely affiliated with SymbioticA.

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6 See the work of Lesley Sharp, Margaret Lock and Margrit Shildrick, for instance, on the social, cultural and philosophical aspects of transplantation. 7 See images from the biopsy in ORLAN (2008: 85–6). 8 See, for instance, Hauser (2008); Donger (2010); Veneciano and Garelick (2010). 9 The catalogue entry is available here: http://www.lgcstandards-atcc. org/products/all/CRL-1502.aspx (accessed 12 December 2018).

Chapter 6 1 See the company website for 23andMe for further insights about the test and results: https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/ (accessed 4 December 2018). 2 My thanks to Anna Harpin for suggesting these links and thoughtful provocations. 3 For more about the transparent body, see Dijck (2005). 4 The piece can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mmQRrs3UsS4 (accessed 18 December 2018). 5 See Chapter 3 for further analysis of transplants and specimens. I have also published a short piece on organ transplantation and its links to performance in Bouchard (2018).

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INDEX

Alberti, Sam and creation of specimens 14–15 on pathological specimens 17, 62, 101 on specimen collections 82, 84, 125 on specimens as composites 40 Altman, Lawrence 117–18, 120, 128 anatomical models creation of 34 and dance 79 and gender differences 33, 37, 147 and wax 38 Anatomical Venus 31–40, 42, 46. See also theatricality as effigy 36, 38 as living anatomy 45 as medical model 39 as surrogate 34–5, 38 Anatomy Act (1832) 52, 55 autopsia 8, 29, 37, 78, 119 bioart 110, 125–6, 138, 140, 153 biocapital entrepreneurs 131 as international trade 92, 113, 122 overthrow of 115 as productive force 112 specimens as 138

technologies of 123 biohacking 111, 121, 122 bio-labour 139 biomedicalization 67, 121 biomedicine and feminist studies 136 and human rights 57, 68 pervasiveness of 21 and property rights 130 and race 136 and society 67, 124, 141 biopolitics. See also Foucault, Michel and politics of life 139 and population 16, 17 and Preciado 111–12 and race 138 bioterrorism 114, 115, 122 Blanchot, Maurice 43 Bleeker, Maaike 96 body and dignity 20, 44, 50, 57, 59–61, 68 and disciplinary regimes 31, 76, 105, 109, 121, 144–6 as laboratory 117 as machine 16 and ‘no property’ principle 53–9, 130, 137 as prop 7, 8, 21 as specimen 8, 11 body snatching 52, 53 Body Worlds 22, 40–8, 75

INDEX

and ethics 49 and Gunther von Hagens 40–5, 47, 49, 71 and plastination 40–1, 43, 47, 49 Braidotti, Rosi 139–40, 144, 151, 155 Butler, Judith 100, 111, 114, 139 Campbell, Alastair 58–9 chimera 150, 152–3, 155–6, 159 definition of 146 in mythology 146–7, 154 tetragametic chimerism 148–9, 152 chimerism and transplantation 148, 156–7, 159–61 Clod Ensemble 87, 100 An Anatomie in Four Quarters 22, 77–83 MUST: The Inside Story 23, 99–105 concorporeality 92 consent and Body Worlds 49 and Henrietta Lacks 54, 56 and human remains 20, 55, 96 and human rights 60, 61, 68, 120 and property rights in the body 57–8 and specimenhood 50, 75 and tissue banking 135 cultural surrogacy 35–6, 37 Dickenson, Donna 53–6, 128–9, 136–7 dissection and Cartesian dualism 96 culture of 28 as excess 46–7 histories of 5–11, 51 as part of disciplinary processes 35

177

and punishment 35 on television 17–18, 71 DNA and chimerism 146–50, 152–3, 159 commercial testing 142–5, 149 myth of 25, 156 and property rights 57, 95 theatrical representation of 154 Elkins, James 42, 79 Embarrassing Bodies 2 ethics. See also consent of care 76, 88 and organ donation 23, 58, 60, 92, 139 and self-experimentation 119–20 and specimenhood 27, 49–69 Fontana, Felice 33 Foucault, Michel and anatomo-politics 17, 62 and biopolitics 16, 50, 111–12, 139, 144 and biopower 16, 19, 64–5, 95, 109 The Birth of Biopolitics 65 The Birth of the Clinic 62 and the individual 66–7 and the medical gaze 16, 19, 63–5, 72, 76 and neoliberalism 22, 65, 68, 69, 95, 96 and normativity 84, 99 and public executions 35 and specimenhood 62 Fraser, Mat 84–8 Cabinet of Curiosities 22, 83–7 Galen of Pergamon 5 gaze as disciplinary 63, 65, 67

178

Hallam, Elizabeth 82 Hardcastle, Rohan 53, 55–7 Harpin, Anna 151 Heyes, Cressida 63, 66, 76 Human Genome Project 137 Human Tissue Act 55–8 and informed consent 55, 57 Joannes de Ketham 5 Jordanova, Ludmilla 32–3, 38 Kelly, Anthony-Noel 55–6 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 75–6 Klaver, Elizabeth 94–6 Kristeva, Julia 43, 96–8, 132 Kuppers, Petra 22, 73–5, 77 Lacks, Henrietta 54–6, 68 Landecker, Hannah 54, 126 Leder, Drew 95, 97, 106 Lobel, Brian 77 Maerker, Anna 33–4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 97, 106 Mermikides, Alex Bloodlines 25, 156–62 Mosley, Michael 24 and self-experiment 118–19, 124 Museo La Specola 22, 31, 33 O’Brien, Martin 23, 105–10, 114 and Bob Flanagan 107 It’s Good to Breath In (This Devon Air) 107 Mucus Factory 105, 107 Regimes of Hardship 107 Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours 109 The Unwell 108 and the zombie 23, 108–10 O’Reilly, Kira 123–34, 139, 140

INDEX

Bad Humours/Affected 124 inthewrongplaceness 24, 128, 129 Marsyas – Running Out of Skin 125–31 organ transplants 57, 60, 88, 90, 139, 159 and donors 90–2, 127, 135, 149, 159 and intercorporeality 91 ORLAN 24, 131–3, 153 Harlequin Coat 24, 132–40 and hybridization 132–40 The Re-Incarnation of Saint ORLAN 131 and self-experimentation 132 Phelan, Peggy 14, 28, 43–4, 155–6 phenomenology 91, 97–9, 106, 114 Preciado, Beatriz/Paul as auto-guinea pig 114–15, 122–3 and biodrag 114 and pharmacopornographic era 111–12, 131 Testo Junkie 23, 111–15 Pynor, Helen, and Peta Clancy The Body is a Big Place 23, 87–92 resurrectionists 10, 52, 53 Burke and Hare 52 Richardson, Ruth 51–2 Roach, Joseph 35–7 Rose, Nikolas 67–8, 120–1, 138–9 Ruysch, Frederik 13–15 Sawday, Jonathan 8, 28–9, 30, 51 and living anatomy 45–6 Schneider, Rebecca 37–8 Shaw, Peggy 77, 114 MUST: The Inside Story 23, 99–105, 110

INDEX

Shildrick, Margrit and biopower 65–6 and the modernist subject 61, 98, 110 and the sick body 98–9 and transplants 91–2, 159 specimen body as 31 and Cartesian dualism 94 and consent 57–8, 60–1, 68 as corpse 1, 5, 7, 8, 43, 62, 109 creation of 29 definition of 9, 10, 17, 19 and disability 84 and disciplinary effects 17 display of 72 and ethical concerns 19–20 and intermediality 82 and legal ownership 53–61 as medical model 30 in medical museums 12, 40, 62, 71, 82–4, 101, 125, 136 subject as 15 as subject/object 93–9 and technology 126, 145, 155, 157, 161 and ‘work or skill exception’ 55–6, 130 specimenhood definition of 27, 144 and detachment 75–6, 86, 159 and disability 64 and DNA 141 and erasure 74–5, 85, 91 formation of 63–4 and genetics 141–62 as medical subjectivity 3 as modern subjectivity 30–1 molecular 141 performance of 98, 110 as postmodern subjectivity 21, 69 and queer subjectivity 23, 103

179

as resistance 113 and selfhood 31 and spectatorship 77 as subjectivity 62–3, 105, 107, 121, 145 and surveillance 76, 83, 159 and theatricality 82 and transplant organs 87 and women 61 spectatorship 2, 5, 20, 21, 34, 77 and anatomical models 37, 47, 147 and specimens 77–80 Stacey, Jackie 154–6 Stein Holum Projects Chimera 25, 146–56, 157, 159, 162 Supersize vs. Superskinny 2, 66, 72–6, 80 SymbioticA Laboratory 125, 132, 134 Thacker, Eugene 143–4, 154, 161 theatricality and Anatomical Venus 22, 34–40 and Body Worlds 22, 41, 44–8 and women 34, 38–9 tissue banks 134–5, 137 tissue culturing 24, 125–6, 128–30, 133, 139, 152 Vesalius, Andreas 8, 42, 78 Visible Human Project 9 Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies 57–8, 60, 135–7 Zylinska, Joanna 110

180

181

182

183

184