Public Bodies: The Nude and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century France
Open Access
- Author:
- Mc Bryde, Brynne D
- Graduate Program:
- Art History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 20, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sarah K Rich, Committee Member
Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Committee Member
Christopher Gervais Reed, Outside Member
Elizabeth C Mansfield, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Art
Art History
Nineteenth Century
Nude
History
History of Medicine
Public Health
Health
Medicine
Gender
Sexuality
Bathing
Masculinity
Gynecology
Women's Health
Intersex
Intersexuality
Pornography
Postcolonial Theory
North Africa
Dance History
Race
Painting
Photography
Visual Culture
Illustration
Book Illustration
Medical Illustration
Caillebotte
Courbet
Nadar
Gerome - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the ways that medicine, visuality, and sexuality were inextricably linked in nineteenth-century France through medical illustrations, photographs, and paintings. It reveals how nonscientific cultural beliefs were encoded as biology in nineteenth-century medical rhetoric then naturalized in visual representations that became part of broader visual culture. Chapter one demonstrates the radically different implications of bathing for men and women through analysis of depictions of male bathers. Unlike images of female bathers, which emphasize a dangerous form of sexuality, visualizations of male bathers connote strength, virility, and civic virtue. The second chapter links nineteenth-century eroticism, vision, and health through Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It shows how the new form of vision offered by the vaginal speculum, along with vision’s link to scientific knowledge, enhanced the eroticism of genital observation by offering the promise of a penetrative gaze. Chapter three uses medical images of nineteenth-century hermaphrodites to reveal how these illustrations naturalized medical rhetoric by representing it in individual human bodies. Rather than promoting the images that most clearly communicate the anatomy of individual patients, doctors preferred those that best reflected their own biological theories. The final chapter focuses on depictions of the danse arabe to reveal how colonial systems of dominance, in both France’s state-run medical apparatus and Parisian Orientalist painting, exploited the rhetoric of vision to establish a series of interlocking and self-reinforcing fictions as observable reality. It demonstrates how myth, when figured as biological knowledge, invades the bodies of observed individuals and justifies a violent disruption between the explanation of those bodies and the experience of them.