The Taboo of the Perverse Dying Body
Kosonen, H. (2014). The Taboo of the Perverse Dying Body. In L. McLean, L. Stafford, & M. Weeks (Eds.), Exploring Bodies in Time and Space (pp. 203-215). Inter-Disciplinary Press.
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2014Copyright
© Inter-Diciplinary Press. This is an electronic final draft version of the article whose final and definitive form has been published by Inter-Diciplinary Press.
A human being is continuously living towards death within a mortal body that is
dying little by little, second after second. In the gloss of popular media, the taboo
reality of this stain of mortality is hidden by a diversion, which is created by the
multiple pornographies of visual culture: the pornography of perfect bodies and the
pornography of violent death. No longer invisible or ‘unspeakable’, the taboo body
has been appropriated to serve a function in the mainstream didactics. Both the
lusus naturae of natural bodies and the decay of sickness and death are squeezed
into such roles in the postmodern visual narrative that the mortality of the human
being appears unlikely and accidental or a mere consequence of living a bad life
instead of the inevitable that it is. As the popular cultural representation of the
monstrous body is both marked with a stigma and marks the inferior other, its
appearance in the art sphere poses a problem for the mainstream didactics in
defying it with the perennial esteem shone on the works of art by their context. But
in the increase of the pornography of death, we see pop art appropriating the
language that now, also in the context of art, speaks of the unlikelihood of dying.
Looking at Andres Serrano’s controversial The Morgue (1992) in relation to Andy
Warhol’s Death and Disaster (1962-63) and Makoto Aida’s Harakiri School Girls
(1999), we can trace the source of the continuously problematic imagery of death
into the problematic of the dying body, marked perverse both by the popular
cultural didactic of the ideal body and the visual cultural pornography of violent,
unlucky death invading our screens.
...
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Inter-Disciplinary PressParent publication ISBN
978-1-84888-247-8Conference
Perustuu konferensseissa The 1st Global Conferences on ‘Time, Space and the Body’ and ‘Body Horror’ (Sydney in February 2013) esitettyyn aineistoon.Is part of publication
Exploring Bodies in Time and SpaceKeywords
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https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/23759570
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