“Body Worlds RX: Prescriptions for Healthy Living” exhibit at the Peoria Waterfront Museum, May 2023

The 20th and 21st Century Cultures Workshop is pleased to welcome:

Heather Glenny

PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

“Even the Eyes are Real!”: Plasticity, Preservation, and Authenticity in the Museum and Horror Film Body

Mon, April 29, from 5:00-6:30pm

Walker 403

with respondent

Tien-Tien Jong Zhang, PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago,

In an entertainment landscape dominated by the digital, what do plasticky practical effects make possible for the human body on screen? For post-structuralists of the 1980s and 90s, a “plastic body” meant one that was infinitely flexible, malleable; semiotically and formally elastic. But in museums, plastification of the human body works differently. In Gunther Von Hagens’s infamous “Body Worlds” (1991-present) exhibition, a patented “plastination” process solidifies and preserves the body, leaving it frozen indefinitely in a plasticky matte and defining the body paradoxically as the “real” thing. There, plasticity is a hardened condition rooting the body to the epistemological values of a museum object, tying it to particular beliefs about truth, pedagogy, preservation, and authenticity. In this draft for a dissertation chapter, I examine how American horror films “The Fly” (1986), “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1987), and “Candyman” (2021) use plasticity in this museological sense, semiotically grounding the human body. Drawing on Franz Fanon’s metaphor of “affective ankylosis,” I ask how “Candyman” (2021) in particular problematizes museological plastification as a settler-colonial narrative epistemology. What stories about and possibilities for the human body emerge when we read plasticity not as semiotic flexibility, but as a material, visual, and hermeneutic crystallization?

Heather’s paper (to be read in advance) can be found here. The password will be distributed to our listserv. Click here to join. 

Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the workshop coordinators, Cassandra Lerer (crblerer@uchicago.edu) and Rhya Moffitt (rhya@uchicago.edu).