Stuffed: On Taxidermic Style

• In Event: Enticing Infestations: Animal Encounters and Contested Belonging in American Literature and Visual Media

Abstract

This paper queries the affective attachments we make with stuffed, embalmed, and otherwise preserved bodies. On one hand, preserving bodies in such a way smacks of melancholy's inability to properly mourn a loss. On the other hand, what does it mean to keep the inanimate body literally around, unable to be fully introjected and still available to perhaps unsettling physical contact? Examining taxidermic instances, then, from Toni Morrison to Evelyn Waugh and Alfred Hitchcock to Lars von Trier, this paper proses to formalize an aesthetics of the unseemly and repulsive, the inert and the partially decomposed--at precisely the point where the ontologies of the human, animal, thing, and aesthetic object converge.

Author

• Cliff Mak, Queens College (CUNY)