The Exhibited Corpse: Spectacle and Display in Body Worlds Johannesburg

Abstract

ABSTRACTTouted as the world's most popular touring exhibition, Body Worlds, the display of “plastinated” human corpses, has been viewed by over 40 million people worldwide. This article builds on existing scholarship of the phenomenon, with an analysis of the exhibition “Body Worlds & The Cycle of Life”, displayed in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2014. It situates Body Worlds as a global consumer product, considering its unchanged appearance within southern contexts, as well as issues of access and health communication in South Africa specifically. The article revisits many of the critiques that were levelled against the original exhibition in order to show the strategies that have been developed to forestall these, arguing that such strategies discursively mask its primary investment in spectacle. The paper considers the ways—aesthetic, identificatory, and ethical—in which Body Worlds operates and argues that these invite particular forms of pleasure that bypass the possible discomfort attendant upon looking at dead bodies. I use a range of sources, from the writings of the exhibition's creator to critical responses, popular reviews, viewer feedback, and autoethnography, to think through Body Worlds’ strategies for making the viewing of a corpse a pleasurable experience.