Erotic Surgery: J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” and the Visual Legacy of the Medical Museum

Abstract

This essay delves into medicine’s historically strange relation to erotic intimacy by juxtaposing an analysis of the exhibitionary objects of medical museums, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus wax models, against speculative fictions by Octavia Butler (“Bloodchild,” 1995) and J. G. Ballard (Crash, 1973). The historically legitimizing structure of dissection and the edutainment of the public medical museum have the potential to catalyze aesthetic fantasies of nude, splayed, vulnerable bodies to those outside the immediate realm of the medical field. Although we might imagine the concept of “erotic surgery” to be one that is relegated to the nightmarish fantasies of dystopic futures, it is an aesthetic phenomenon that looks back into surgical history as much as it looks forward.