Elizabeth Stephens

The spectacularized penis - Contemporary representations of the phallic male body

Feminist critics have often remarked on the striptease of appearance and disappearance by which the phallus both determines dominant cultural assumptions about sexuality and corporeality while simultaneously effacing the specificity of the penis. Through an examination of contemporary representations of the penis in the popular media—such as the media coverage of the Bobbitt trial, The Puppetry of the Penis stage show, the freak-show performer Mr Lifto, and the work of Cynthia Plastercaster—this article elucidates the mechanisms of effacement by which the specificity of the physical penis is obscured by a phallic ideal. In bringing the relationship between phallus and penis into focus, this article aims to challenge a number of important critical assumptions about the structure and operation of phallocentrism. Contrary to the widespread assumption that the phallic male body represents a rigidly stable and self-contained corporeality, in this paper I will argue that it is precisely the phallic penis which opens the male body to the possibility of transformation and otherness.

Pathologizing Leaky Male Bodies: Spermatorrhea in Nineteenth-Century British Medicine and Popular Anatomical Museums

I am twenty-seven years of age, of a delicate, nervous temperament; I am single, and likely to remain so, unless you can assist me; for there is no disguising the fact, I am impotent through the effects of selfpollution, which I practised from eleven years of age until twentytwo, when I became acquainted with its mischief and left it off for ever. I then obtained medical advice, which gave me only temporary relief. . . . I am much afraid I am suffering from Spermatorrhoea. . . . I have a slight cough always on me, with shortness of breathing, and I am very thin. I often turn very giddy when rising or stooping hurriedly. Reading the slightest thing of a sentimental character brings tears to my eyes, which I cannot help, although I feel them to be maudlin. . . . I have no confidence in myself. I blush and look guilty at the slightest thing said to me, whether right or wrong; blushing and becoming pallid by turns.

Inventing the bodily interior: Écorché figures in early modern anatomy and von Hagens' Body Worlds

Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition contextualises its display of plastinated bodies within the Renaissance tradition of écorché (or flayed body) art—surrounding its figures with screen-prints of early modern anatomical illustrations, labels bearing explanatory medical information, and quotations about the body and mortality from religious and philosophical sources. This paper argues that the early modern écorché figure informs not only the iconography, but also the kind of anatomical knowledge—the anatomised vision of the body—that Body Worlds reproduces. While images of early modern anatomical art serve to foreground the declared educational aim of the show, primarily by contextualising it within a long history of public anatomy, they also reveal that for von Hagens, as for the Renaissance anatomists before him, the anatomical significance of the body is to be found by removing its skin and exposing its interior. Such images do not simply reveal the inside of the body, this article demonstrates, but rather represent the invention of a specifically modern concept of bodily interiority, one intricately connected to a wider reconceptualisation of the body as individual and self-contained.

Queer writing: homoeroticism in Jean Genet's fiction

Queer Writing provides the first full-length study of homoeroticism in Jean Genets fiction. It shows how the theory of writing elaborated in his work provides a new way to understand homosexual literature, not as the inscription of a stable sexual subjectivity but as the mobilization of a perverse dynamic within the text.

Cultural Fixions of the Freak Body: Coney Island and the Postmodern Sideshow

I was growing my beard long before I worked in the sideshow, so I always had this image of the bearded lady as kind of this little icon sitting on my shoulder, you know, battling with me and how I was seen in the world. So when the opportunity came, when I was invited, enticed, to come work in the sideshow, I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to meet this person, this image, this history that I had been in dialogue with, sort of face to face. (Rust, 2004)

The bad homosexual: Genet's perverse homo-politics

Although widely recognized as pivotal texts in the history of homosexual literature, Genet’s novels occupied a largely negative position within gay criticism of the 1990s, by which they were seen to reproduce heterocentric, even homophobic assumptions about same-sex desire. This article argues that Genet’s contentious decision to articulate homoerotic desire within the space of a heteronormative language is one necessitated by the structural constraints of language itself. Metafictively drawing attention to the absence of a language in which to communicate homoerotic desire, Genet represents his narrators and characters as locked in a closet of heteronormative language. His strategic response to this silencing is to appropriate and recontextualize heterocentric and homophobic discourses in ways that problematize their assumed heteronormativity. In contrast to the gay critical focus on whether Genet himself has internalized heteronormative assumptions about his sexuality and subjectivity, Genet’s texts remind us that the question is not simply an individualized one of what the author him/herself thinks, but rather how s/he might articulate expressions of desire within a language that seems designed to erase such expressions of difference.

Sensation machine: Film, phenomenology and the training of the senses

This paper aims to extend recent work in feminist phenomenological film theory by contextualizing its turn to the tactile within the longer history of the philosophy of the senses and their training. Following the work of Vivian Sobchack, a recent generation of feminist film theorists have drawn on phenomenological understandings of embodiment to argue that while film criticism has focused, almost exclusively, on the visible, intelligible qualities of cinema, our experience of cinema is shaped by our bodily sensations. As Sobchack (2004, 63) argues, ‘we do not see any movie only through our eyes’; rather, we ‘feel films with our whole bodily being’. This turn from the dominant sense of sight to that of touch represents a shift in critical perspective, too, as this paper will show. Whereas sight is examined for its privileged relation to knowledge, and thus understood as highly cultivated, touch is often celebrated for its potential as a site of resistance. Unlike sight, touch is often evoked as a spontaneous reaction that destabilizes assumptions about the way we make sense. This paper aims to contribute to this recent work in feminist film theory, by demonstrating that touch, too, is part of the long history of the training of the senses – in which cinema itself plays a substantial role. Rather than a critique of the relationship between sight and touch, I argue, this work represents the continuation and reconfiguration of a long history in which sight and touch have been privileged amongst the senses and conceptualized interdependently.

Sex as a normalising technology: early-twentieth-century public sex education campaigns

This article examines the conceptual interdependence of sexuality and normality. It begins with an interrogation of the widespread association of queer studies and practice with, in Judith Halberstams words, ‘nonnormative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity’. To contextualise this, the article traces the historical circumstances in which normality and sexuality emerge contemporaneously, as mutually reinforcing aspects of what Foucault has termed the disciplinary society. This article considers the ongoing impact of this history by taking as its focus the development of a public discourse about sex in the public education campaigns about venereal disease in the early-twentieth-century USA. In so doing, it aims to problematise assumptions with contemporary queer theory that ‘normative’ sexuality itself represents a stable status quo against which queers celebration of the fluid and contingent can be unproblematically contrasted, by demonstrating the volatility of the sexual ‘norm’ itself.

Venus in the archive: anatomical waxworks of the pregnant body

By the time the surrealists discovered Spitzner’s anatomical Venuses (see Figure 1) travelling the fairgrounds of France and Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s as part of ‘Dr’ Pierre Spitzner’s Grand Museum of Anatomy and Hygiene, the history of popular anatomy museums of which it was once a part had been all but forgotten. The surrealists’ appreciation for the Spitzner collection, and particularly for its Venus, was aesthetic rather than scientific, motivated by its strangeness and obsolescence as bric-a-brac of a bygone era, rather than its value as a collection of anatomical models. Paul Delvaux, who visited the Grand Museum of Anatomy and Hygiene during the Brussels Midi Fair in 1932, subsequently painted a series of canvasses inspired by the collection, including ‘La musée Spitzner’ (1943) and ‘The Sleeping Venus’ (1944). Despite the fascination these figures still exerted for artists like Delvaux in the mid-twentieth century, within a few decades Spitzner’s Venuses, which had been on display continuously since the 1860s (originally in Spitzner’s Grand Musée Anatomique et Ethnologique, and then in progressively shabbier and more itinerant contexts), would disappear definitively from public view. Surviving documents about these Venuses is fragmentary and partial. Few records were kept about their manufacture or acquisition: of the exhibits in the ‘lowbrow, almost pornographic, itinerant wax anatomical collections which traveled the fair circuit’ (Schwartz 1998, 103) almost nothing remains, leaving only the collections in public and professional museums (such as La Specola in Florence and the Josephinum in Vienna) on public display. Despite a lack of archival documentation regarding audience numbers or composition for these exhibitions (which makes their level of popularity difficult to ascertain), given that tours of anatomical Venuses in commercial exhibition spaces began in the early 1700s, and that the first permanent anatomical collections emerged in the middle of that century, the exhibition of anatomical Venuses might be seen to have played an important role in cultivating a taste for such spectacles. In the early 1700s, it should be remembered, anatomy was still considered a controversial act, one that was associated with crime, grave-robbing and public executions, and would continue to be so until well into the next century. Against popular and professional resistance, however, over this period practical anatomy was beginning to emerge as an increasingly important part of medical training. During the second half of the eighteenth century, and more especially during the nineteenth century, rapid developments in surgical procedure made anatomy and surgery a progressively more prominent part of modern medical practice, with a corresponding increase in public acceptance. This paper examines the role of popular exhibitions of anatomical Venuses in facilitating this growing public acceptance of anatomy by providing a space for its popularisation. In so doing, the paper aims to track two interwoven histories: firstly, it recovers the available archive on anatomical Venuses, focusing on the

Eugenics and the normal body: the role of visual images and intelligence testing in framing the treatment of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century

Abstract This article examines how the emergence of a statistical concept of the normal at the end of the nineteenth century led to the development of a theory of eugenics, and examines the cultural pathways by which this theory came to shape both the public perception and institutional treatment of people now understood as disabled. The statistical idea of the normal and the theory of eugenics were developed simultaneously in the work of one man: Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and often identified as the first ‘social Darwinist.’ Beginning with an analysis of the role of composite photography in Galton’s research, this article traces the historical co-emergence of normality and eugenics along two key lines of development: the use of new visual imagining techniques in the public sphere as a means by which to popularize these ideas amongst a general audience, and their application in the institutional and legal treatment of disabled people in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, the article intends to provide a careful history of the development and application of eugenical thinking and practice in the Anglophone world over this period of emergence and influence.