Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives

From La Bambola to a Toronto Striptease: Drawing Out Public Consent to Gender Differentiation with Anatomical Material

From La Bambola to a Toronto Striptease: Drawing Out Public Consent to Gender Differentiation with Anatomical Material Annette Burfoot T he long history of anatomical display dates back at least from the classic period when people left wax votives of afflicted body parts at Greek and Roman temples, seeking divine intervention. However, a notable development took place during the 1700s. Anatomy and its display in illustrated texts, anatomical theatres, and medical teaching museums spread throughout developed Europe as the scientific revolution settled in and modern medicine began to take shape. Within this growing visual culture, a political mediation between public and private display of the opened body heralded important gender subjectivities that persist today in the visual culture of anatomy. Thischaptercomparesthetreatmentof genderinrelationtohowandwhen the anatomical body is publicly displayed in three exhibits: the eighteenthcentury exhibit at the Florentine museum commonly known as La Specola, the mid-twentieth-century Canadian gynecological collection now housed at the Kingston Museum of Health Care, and the roving, international exhibit entitled Body Worlds II. Despite the significant temporal and spatial settings involved, the models examined here share in the visual publication of a socially inscribed body that includes perpetuation of engendered norms. The anatomical models and their public display are emblematic of the growth in the social capital of medicine and its concomitant establishment as authority over the body throughout the time period. Methodologically, this chapter follows what Nina Lykke describes as “feminist cultural studies of technoscience,” which is an amalgamation 175 Popular Representations of the Body in Sickness and Health 176 of three key literatures and approaches: feminist studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.1 The amalgamation is fluid and interdisciplinary , “a special kind of hermeneutic tradition that can ‘open up’ an unlimited number of topics.”2 As a science study, we will explore how the popularization of medical anatomy from late-eighteenth-century Europe to contemporary North America played a key role in giving voice and place to modern medicine’s authority over the body. A feminist analysis of the perpetuation of gender norms is core to this chapter and is based in a visual discursive interpretation of the anatomical models and their public presentation. La Specola: Medical Science and the Gendered Body La Specola is deemed the oldest public museum in the Western world; it is located near Palazzo Pitti, the grand former Florentine home of the Tuscan dukes. Inaugurated in 1775 as the Imperiale Regio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale (the Imperial Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History), the museum is found just downVia Romano from the ducal palace (Palazzo Pitti) and is connected at the back through an impressive set of gates to the palace’s extensive gardens (Il Giardino Boboli). Later, the museum and the palace buildings were connected with the Poccianti Corridor, thus extending the Vasari Corridor from the Palazzo Vecchio (the seat of the ducal government) via the Uffizi, where the duchy’s art treasures were stored, through the Palazzo Pitti (the ducal residence) to La Specola. These architectural details signify the important links among the government of the day, that government’s prized culture, and the rising social significance of science and technology. They also echo Michel Foucault’s mapping in Madness and Civilization of the geo-discursive pathways of civilized health a century later, as lepers were isolated from civil society in France and its colonies.3 The body as flesh, especially obviously diseased flesh, became a social scapegoat and a useful delimiter: lepers were characterized as sinners punished by God but also served as a public reminder of the need for Christian charity. Leper colonies, along with the “saints” who worked in them, became signs of the dominant culture’s benevolence and also of medicine’s relatively new place as the site of salvation. Long after cures for leprosy were developed and the need for the isolation of those suffering from the disease was disputed, the social delineation between well and diseased bodies was drawn with specified roles for the sick, the physician, and the proper location for treatment: the hospital. Foucault’s analysis lends itself well to the anatomical display at La Specola, From La Bambola to a Toronto Striptease Annette Burfoot 177 which established a regime of corporeal governance that clearly educated the public on the anatomical and pathological. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold of Hapsburg-Lotharingen, is often portrayed not only as the museum...