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Abstract
This dissertation is about scenes of learning staged with and within cadavers. The human body is a peculiar pedagogical object: it poses specific challenges, makes particular demands, and opens unique opportunities for learners, educators, and institutions. Most importantly, when a human body becomes a cadaver in the matrix of medical education in the United States, it enjoys a status as the real thing. In this logic, truth is within and knowledge is visceral. Despite—or as I’ll argue, often because of—the ways preservation alters the body’s materiality, a cadaver is always evidentiary. What becomes possible for teaching and learning when the evidentiary status of the body is always a given? Drawing on fields parsing how the human body becomes an instrument of biopower (e.g., postcolonial studies, critical race studies), alongside methods invested in interpretive meaning-making practices (media studies, pedagogy studies, literary theory), and practical concerns to improve health and health education (medical humanities), this dissertation offers new angles for understanding the body made pedagogy. Chapter one close-reads “dissection portraits” from Case Western’s Dittrick Archive; photographs from American medical schools 1880-1930 where students pose with cadavers, often putting their own clothes, cigarettes, and accessories on the bodies. I argue that modernist “clipping culture”—seen in scrapbooks, collage poems, etc.—informs how students reimagine their roles as future physicians not just as architects of health, but also creators of socially legible images of race and gender. The second chapter thinks about Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropower as a heuristic for understanding the pedagogy of cadaver plastination in Gunther von Hagens’s “Body Worlds” exhibitions (1997-present). I look at crises of “plastinated” preservation in three films—David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986), Todd Haynes’s “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1987), and Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” (2021)—as imperfect rehearsals of how necropower consolidates control as a form of cadaveric preservation: “unmediated,” naturalized, pedagogical. In chapter three, I suggest that cadaveric fat tissue—considered waste in dissection manuals from the early twentieth century through today—is cartocorporeal. Like a map, its interpretative horizons are associative through color, border, and lateral contact. I read the image of cadaveric fat in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Biography of A Dress” (1992) as it complicates what it means to “dissect” Kincaid’s writing for autobiography, decolonial critique, and truth. The final chapter sits in on the UChicago Pritzker School of Medicine’s annual Remembrance Service, where students perform poems, songs, and speeches for the families of their cadaver donors. This overlooked but ubiquitous American medical school tradition provides space for multiple, highly subjunctive imaginations of who cadavers “might have been”; a key pedagogical performance reshaping cadavers into immaterial, uncertain, and queered intimate attachments. Finally, in the coda I consider how the erotic has threaded through the background of the dissertation. Building on representations of eros from Caravaggio to Anne Carson and Audre Lorde, I open space for further research on the erotics of medical pedagogy and the multiple, visceral intimacies at the heart of the cadaver.