Queer Anatomies : Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900

offered cultural legitimacy, healing authority, and aesthetic discernment to those who practiced 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, and 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 savored 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. [Publisher's Text]

616369 characters.