Dr Sarah Churchwell, UEA

This paper analyzes the reception and representations of what are arguably the two most famous female corpses of the twentieth century: Eva Peron and Marilyn Monroe. Both women are represented as corpses in a variety of textual and visual forms. The reception of these images raises questions about the ethics, politics and taste of reproducing them, while reconstituting the primacy of these dead bodies and wrestling with what they represent. The mobility and accessibility of these female corpses and their representations are at odds with the stability and "dignity" of iconic male corpses like those of Lenin and Mao. Anxieties about female sexuality and corrollary fears about promiscuous circulation (where the body is not distinguished from the image), contrarily, emblematize the representations of these women in death - as they did in life.

The reception of these dead women reveals that their various audiences can invest them with either the aesthetic function or the obscene. This paper, then, begins to formulate the way in which mass media variously presents and sells representations of these dead women as aesthetic, even religious, icons and as obscene reminders of death, pathology and the dangers of promiscuous feminine circulation.

Julie Doyle, University of Sussex

Recent media hysteria over the non-consensual retention of body parts at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, demonstrated a public unease with the dissective processes associated with the medical establishment, as well as questioning the authority invested in its practitioners. At the same time, the emotive language and headlines deployed by the media - 'He stripped the organs form every dead child he touched'; 'Gathering dust in a Liverpool laboratory were thousands of body parts, including 46 heads' - represented a continuing cultural investment in 'the body' as a complete and whole entity; a fantasy of wholeness constructed, conversely, through an understanding of 'the body' as composed of detachable, definable parts. This paper will thus examine the tensions which underpin this cultural investment in both the dead and living body - as whole, yet essentially fragmented - locating an historical trajectory emergent through developments in a discourse of anatomy/surgery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which finds its contemporary expression through the media hysteria surrounding the Alder Hey scandal. Arguing for an acknowledgement that the medical profession has always collected body parts, the paper will examine the contexts in which the cultural 'exposure' of such practices calls attention to the anxieties implicated in the very notion of a 'composite' body upon which a 'whole' body is premised. Where the recent scandal invokes historical anxieties concerning the redefinition of cultural knowledge through a composite body narrative, as witnessed in Shelley's Frankenstein, the paper will also examine how body parts are invested with meaning through their relation to a whole body referent. Foregrounding historical connections, the paper will thus examine notions of the body through the spectre of the 'composite' body, exploring the tensions inherent to this conceptualisation, and questioning the epistemologies of cultural knowledge upon which it is grounded.

Iman Hamam, University of Sussex

This paper explores the mummy as an object of archeological (and thus, scientific) analysis. Mummies were initially incorporated in the West as medicine in powdered form. In addition, doctors publically unravelled mummies in their homes. The presentation of the body in this context transformed to encompass filmic representations of the mummy as a figure of horror. The cinematic experience emerged parallel to the scientific discourses of the mummy. While maintaining its status as archeological evidence, the mummy remains elusive, mysterious and aligned with the magical 'freak' shows of the nineteenth century.

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