Search results for "Medical gaze"

Animated Corpses: Communicating with Post Mortals in an Anatomical Exhibition

2006

‘Plastinates’ (i.e. corpses conserved through plastics) are lab created artifacts which since the nineties have been the subject of a cultural field experiment via an anatomical exhibition. Similarly to brain-dead or digitalized bodies, they constitute an ambiguous form of post-mortem existence. The article inquires after the ways in which the ontological status of these entities is constituted through the practices of body donors, anatomists and visitors. Plastinates owe their ambiguity to an oscillation between two different frames of perception. Their meaning is determined by the extent to which an anatomy exhibition can impose a ‘medical gaze’ over a non-professional way of perception, …