Michael Sappol: Queer Anatomies. Aesthetics & perverse desire in the anatomical image; Or, The Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet

Datum
17. Okto­ber 2025 

Vir­tu­al lecture

Dr Michael Sap­pol: „Queer Anatomies. Aes­thet­ics & per­verse desire in the anatom­i­cal image; Or, The Epis­te­mol­o­gy of the Anatom­i­cal Closet”

IMHAR Salon_Guest: Dr Michael Sap­pol: „Queer Anatomies”
17.Okt. 2025
16:00–17:30 h/4–5:30 p.m. CET

Mod­er­a­tion: PD Dr. Katha­ri­na Sabernig

in Eng­lish

Sex­u­al body-parts and same-sex desire were unmen­tion­ables in 18th- and 19th-cen­tu­ry Europe, debarred from polite con­ver­sa­tion and print­ed dis­course. Yet one sci­en­tif­ic discipline—anatomy—had license to rep­re­sent the inti­mate details of the human body—rectum and gen­i­talia includ­ed. The images of anato­my could be sober­ly tech­ni­cal, but just as often mon­strous, flir­ta­tious, the­atri­cal, beau­ti­ful. And sen­su­al. Anatom­i­cal fig­ures gave off heat, pro­vid­ed plea­sure and legit­i­ma­tion to the men who pro­duced and gazed upon, and col­lect­ed, rare books and art. For those men, Anato­my had a priv­i­leged sta­tus as a foun­da­tion­al sub­ject in art and med­ical ped­a­gogy, and in the ency­clo­pe­dic cur­ricu­lum of Enlight­en­ment dis­course. Philo­soph­i­cal, med­ical and aes­thet­ic com­pe­tence, all depend­ed on a secure knowl­edge of anatomy.
Yet our his­tor­i­cal actors didn’t open­ly declare their erot­ic inter­ests. If, as Eve Kosof­sky Sedg­wick argued, “closeted-ness…is a per­for­mance initiated…by the speech act of a silence,” then we need to peer into their tex­tu­al and rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al spaces, and decode their images and actions. Focus­ing on cel­e­brat­ed atlases and works that danced on the bor­der­line of respectabil­i­ty, Mike Sap­pol uses queer the­o­ry, close read­ing, and the com­par­a­tive method to recov­er the lost world of Enlight­en­ment and post-Enlight­en­ment queer anatomy.

Michael Sap­pol is a his­to­ri­an of the visu­al cul­ture of med­i­cine and sci­ence, and Vis­it­ing Researcher in the His­to­ry of Sci­ence & Ideas at Upp­sala Uni­ver­si­ty. He is the author of Queer Anatomies (2024), Body Mod­ern (2017), and A Traf­fic of Dead Bod­ies (2002). He is cur­rent­ly work­ing on a his­to­ry of pho­to­graph­ic anato­my and an explo­ration of the cul­tur­al pol­i­tics sur­round­ing anatom­i­cal objects and collections.

For reg­is­tra­tion mail to: anmelden@imhar.net.

IMHAR Insti­tute for Med­ical & Health Human­i­ties and Artis­tic Research
An-Insti­tut der HKS, Ottersberg
Große Straße 107
28870 Ottersberg
Deutschland