Queer Anatomies

In centuries past, sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were unmentionables, debarred from polite conversation and printed discourse. Yet one scientific discipline—anatomy—had licence to represent and narrate the intimate details of the human body—anus and genitals included.

Figured within the frame of an anatomical plate, presentations of dissected bodies and body-parts were often soberly technical, but just as often monstrous, provocative, flirtatious, theatrical, beautiful, and even sensual. Queer Anatomies explores overlooked examples of erotic expression within 18th and 19th-century anatomical imagery. It uncovers the subtle eroticism of certain anatomical illustrations, and the queerness of the men who made, used, and collected them.

As a foundational subject for physicians, surgeons, and artists in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, anatomy was a privileged, male-dominated domain. Artistic and medical competence depended on a deep knowledge of anatomy and offered cultural legitimacy, healing authority, and aesthetic discernment to those who practised it. The anatomical image could serve as a virtual queer space, a private or shared closet, or a men’s club. Serious anatomical subjects were charged with erotic, often homoerotic, undertones.

Taking brilliant works by Gautier Dagoty, William Cheselden, and Joseph Maclise, among many others, Queer Anatomies assembles a lost archive of queer expression—115 illustrations, in full-colour reproduction—that range from images of nudes, dissected bodies, penises, vaginas, rectums, hands, faces, and skin, to scenes of male viewers gazing upon works of art governed by anatomical principles. Yet the men who produced and savoured illustrated anatomies were reticent, closeted.

Diving into these textual and representational spaces via essayistic reflection, Queer Anatomies decodes their words and images, even their silences. With a range of close readings and comparison of key images, this book unearths the connections between medical history, connoisseurship, queer studies, and art history, and the understudied relationship between anatomy and desire.