Part of Area Impossible: Sexuality and Geopolitics
The first event in the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature 2017-2018 Sexuality & Geopolitics Seminar Series will feature Ari Heinrich, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSD. Their lecture, “Chinese Bodies as Biological Surplus: Plastinated Cadavers and Geopolitical Hierarchies of the Human” will question what a comparative examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human cadaver exhibits might reveal about the political economics of race and capital distribution that inform them.A firestorm of human rights critiques often greets the opening of an exhibit of plastinated cadavers in Europe and North America, obscuring any attempts to critique the notion of the human (and indeed of “rights”) in the smoke from its blaze. This talk asks what a comparative examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human cadaver exhibits might reveal about the political economies of race and capital distribution that inform them.
Date: February 27, 2018
Time: 5:30 – 8:00 PM
Location: Humanities 348
