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ILLUSTRATIONS AND (L)IMITATIONS IN WESTERN ART AND

SCIENCE: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF INTERSECTIONS IN THE CO-

CREATION OF LIBERAL HUMANISM

Ilustraciones e (l)imitaciones en el arte y la ciencia occidentales: Una biografía

crítica de las intersecciones en la co-creación del humanismo liberal

Mónica Bradley

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a critical biography revealing certain historical intersections and divisions between Western art and science and

points to specific moments where they have worked together through an exclusionary version of liberal humanism. This version of

liberal humanism was often constructed through the dehumanization of women, people of color, people with disabilities and sexual

minorities who were relegated to the non-human, the almost human, the animal or the monstrous. As part of the methods, it offers

a critical genealogy, sifting through the cultural vestiges of art, science, philosophy, medicine, atlases, illustrations, colonial and

eugenic discourses, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, and visual culture in order to recover and reconstruct specific

connections between art and science in different historical periods (from the late 1400so the present). By drawing attention to the

fact that “the human” has been a shifting and unstable signifier, this paper concludes that both Western art and science have the

ability to help co-construct humanity by formulating new more equitable assemblages or the power to magnify already existing

power disparities.

Key Words: History of art and science, liberal humanism, critical theory, feminist science studies, post-humanism.

RESUMEN

Este artículo ofrece una biografía crítica que revela ciertas intersecciones y divisiones históricas entre el arte y la ciencia

occidentales y señala momentos específicos en los que han trabajado juntos a través de una versión excluyente del humanismo

liberal. Esta versión del humanismo liberal a menudo se construyó a través de la deshumanización de las mujeres, las personas de

color, las personas con discapacidades y las minorías sexuales que fueron relegadas a lo no humano, lo casi humano, lo animal o

lo monstruoso. Como parte de los métodos, ofrece una genealogía crítica, tamizando los vestigios culturales del arte, la ciencia, la

filosofía, la medicina, los atlas, las ilustraciones, los discursos coloniales y eugenésicos, las teorías feministas, queer y

poscoloniales, y la cultura visual para recuperar y reconstruir conexiones específicas entre el arte y la ciencia en diferentes períodos

históricos (desde finales del siglo XV hasta el presente). Al llamar la atención sobre el hecho de que “lo humano” ha sido un

significante cambiante e inestable, este artículo concluye que tanto las artes como las ciencias occidentales tienen la capacidad de

ayudar a co-construir la humanidad mediante la formulación de nuevos ensamblajes más equitativos o el poder de magnificar las

ya existentes disparidades de poder.

Palabras clave: Historia del arte y la ciencia, humanismo liberal, teoría crítica, estudios científicos feministas, posthumanismo.

*Universidad de Costa Rica. San José, Costa Rica. Escuela de Lenguas Modernas. Correo electrónico:

monica.bradley@ucr.ac.cr

DOI: 10.15517/RK.V45I2.48184

Recepción: 22/11/2019 Aceptación: 21/4/2021

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1. Arriving at a Genealogy

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to lead to its dissipation […] It seeks

to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us (Foucault, 1977, p. 162).

It matters how we arrive at the places we do (Ahmed, 2007, p. 2).

I would like to insist on the embodied nature all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out

of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies,

that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen to represent while escaping representation (Haraway,

1988, p. 158).

This paper sifts through certain cultural vestiges of art, science, philosophy, medicine, atlases,

illustrations, colonial and eugenic discourses, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, and visual culture

in order to reveal specific connections between art and science in different historical periods. This critical

feminist excavation moves between different periods (from the late 1400s to the present) in order to explore

instances where specific trends and intersections of Western art and science have worked together to prove

the existence of physical and biological differences in regards to race, gender, sexuality, and ability in

Western culture in which these differences have negatively impacted those with less power in society.

Likewise, the critical biography offered uncovers historical moments where those who hold the power to

make “objective truth claims” have often been those who have constructed, recorded, and presented as

“fact” the histories of these events which has, in turn, worked to elevate and maintain the power of some

while restricting the power and movement of others. As feminist and phenomenological theorist Ahmed

asserts, “What is reachable is determined precisely by orientations that we have already taken” (2007, p.

55). She continues,

For bodies to arrive in spaces where they are not at home, where they are not in place involves hard

work; indeed, it involves painstaking labor for bodies to inhabit spaces that do not extend their

shape. Having arrived, such bodies might in turn acquire new shapes. And spaces in turn acquire

new bodies (2007, p. 62).

Accordingly, without the labor of other critical theorists, scientists, and artists, this paper would

not be able to turn towards the subjects of art, science, and social justice here. Hence, this genealogy pays

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homage to all who have struggled against societal and academic norms to provide the opportunity to disrupt

mistakes of the past. As Foucault (1977) contends:

Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates behind

the dispersion of forgotten things… Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and

does not map the destiny of a people, it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or

conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that

gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value to us (p.146).

Unlike traditional historians who attempt to fight against their positionality in order to stay

“objective” in their research, genealogy compels us to stress the inconsistencies, subjectivities, and complex

play of events involved in any historical, scientific, artistic, philosophical knowledge claim. Indeed, this

genealogy has its critical feminist, decolonial “object” in mind and, thus, stresses the partiality of its

assemblage or “situated knowledge”:

The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural

narratives about objectivity are allegories or the ideologies governing the relations of what we call

mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and

situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to

become answerable for what we learn how to see (Haraway, 1988, p. 583).

Thus, this paper engages with multiple histories to “dig up” different predetermined “objects”

involved in Western art, science, and feminism. For instance, by investigating science, which is associated

with objectivity, masculinity, and the mind, and revealing its inherently partial, sometimes even,

oppositional, historical connections with art, associated with subjectivity, femininity and the body, the

discontinuity and falsehood of both claims becomes evident. Yet, oftentimes, Western art and science have

had contradicting roles in political projects in different historical moments, where science typically has

more institutional privilege and art is typically more critical of these institutions. Yet these hierarchical

separations have not existed trans-historically; rather, they involve a complex interplay of events that have

affected how many Western people view these mutable, dynamic, complex and cross-disciplinary fields

today. As such, by subverting claims about certain realities and producing other forms of knowledge,

humanity can arrive at new places where science, art, history, and bodies are constructed differently. As

Foucault (1977) writes,

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History becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being—as it

divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself […].

That is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting (p. 154).

According to Foucault (1977), rather than asserting the existence of an objective and linear history

waiting to be revealed, genealogy strives to record its own history (p. 152). He argues that genealogy should

stress the pluralities and contradictions involved in all truth constructions. Since there is a multitude of

interpretations around different events, objects, people, etc., history can never be completely known; all

that can be really be understood is the knowledge produced in deep-rooted disciplinary practices. Ahmed

(2007) concurs, the disciplinary lines of academia (such as the lines between art, science, and philosophy)

are drawn to keep the inheritance (and interpretations) of knowledge intact:

Disciplines also have lines in the sense that they have a specific “take” on the world, a way of

ordering time and space through the very decisions about what counts as within the discipline. Such

lines mark out the edges of disciplinary homes, which also mark out those who are “out-of-line”

[…] The promise of interdisciplinary scholarship is that the failure to return texts to their histories

will do something… The following keeps taking us in a different direction, as we keep noticing

other points (pp. 22-3).

Like Ahmed, many other marginalized people have never had a disciplinary residence to call home

and, therefore, do not feel secure within their borders. However, women’s studies and other

interdisciplinary residences provide a broad array of knowledge to explore functioning simultaneously as

an interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary. Hence, following in the deviating lines of Ahmed and other

interdisciplinary feminist, queer and critical scholars, these disciplines draw researchers to the danger of

non-linear knowledge. Foucault, likewise, stresses the importance of danger in academic research, writing:

The will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene

mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly multiples risks, creates dangers in every area […]

it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its subversion and destruction” (1997, p. 163).

Many people typically marginalized within the sciences have tended to follow lines that may have

led them away from the sciences (women, for instance, are often made to feel out of place in sciences and

this alienation can cause women to choose other directions). Nevertheless, recently, many scholars have

moved towards the sciences and realized that one does not have compartmentalize or look in different

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directions to explore art and science but can turn toward the “co-incidences” of the two (Ahmed, 2007, p.

39). Ahmed expounds,

The dash in co-incidence must be highlighted here to avoid turning the shared arrival into a matter

or chance. To ‘co-incide’ suggests how different things happen at the same moment, a happening

that brings things near to other things, whereby nearness shapes the shape of each thing (2007, p.

39).

Hence, the co-incidences between art and science in different historical periods provide provocative

information about the shape these two disciplines take and have they have likewise shaped the Western

world and the global understanding of it.

2. The Role of Visual Imagery

Visual culture assembles diverse accesses to a phenomenological world that sustains and envelops us primarily through our

senses, especially through our optical sense, which extends the reach of our sensory body (Wilding, 2003, p. 30).

By examining the role of visual culture in certain illuminating moments in the history of both

Western art and science, the interdependence of both becomes clear. In past decades, researchers have

revealed that the arts and sciences have not always been considered opposing or antagonistic endeavors and

that, indeed, the sciences do rely on the humanities, and the humanities do, unquestionably, rely on the

sciences. For instance, Martin Kemp’s book Visualizations; The Nature Book of Art and Science (2004)

explores “the shared motifs in the imaginative worlds of artist and scientists […] [in] Western art from the

Renaissance to the present day” (p. V). Visual imagery affects many aspects of culture, including almost

every discipline in Western academia. Despite the allegations of the disparities between the arts and

sciences, the visual representations in science have affected the production of art at the same time that

artistic conventions have affected the production of science. As feminist art historian Jones (2003) writes,

“Visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating

contemporary life” (p. 1). Similarly, without the collaborative work of scientists and artists, neither

discipline would exist as it does and many artists have worked as scientists and vice versa. After all, the

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Renaissance is a foundational source for contemporary art and science and excelling at both science and art

is part of the definition of a “Renaissance man” (a man who, in the likeness of some Renaissance elites,

excels in many areas of knowledge, including the arts and sciences).

Likewise, Pamela Smith (2002) asserts “Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western Europe played

a unique role in the development of various arts and sciences devoted to the imitation of nature” (p. 3).

Perhaps in more recent times, western science has this “[devotion] to the imitation of nature” even further

to include its control, creation, and manipulation. For instance, Haraway (1997) points to another

connection between the Renaissance and current scientific and artistic practices:

The conjoined Western modern sense of the “real” and the “natural” was achieved by a set of

fundamental innovations in visual technology beginning with the Renaissance. Twentieth-century

scientists call on this earlier visual technology for insisting on a specific kind of reality, which makes

today’s observers forget the conditions, apparatuses, and histories of its production. Especially in

computer and information sciences and in biotechnology and biomedicine, representations of late-

twentieth century technoscience make liberal use of early modern European

art/humanism/technology (p. 182).

Haraway uses two advertisements by Wally Neibart in the magazine Science (1995) to demonstrate

how contemporary scientific culture is influenced and connected to Renaissance ideals. In these

advertisements, Neibart cleverly comments on the fetishization of the genes by referencing biotechnologies

“hyperhumanist discourse” and linking biotechnologies with consumer culture and Renaissance art

(Haraway, 1997, p. 151). In the first advertisement, he drew a framed DNA sequence hung on a gallery

wall with other Renaissance portrait paintings, while one prosperous-looking (white) man tells another

prosperous-looking (white) man that he acquired the work via the autoradiograph machine that Neibart is

advertising: “like humanist paintings, the autoradiograph is a self-portrait of man in its particular form […]

the DNA gel is about technology, instrumentation, optics, framing, angle of vision, lighting, color, new

forms of authorship, and new forms of patronage” (p. 153-4). In the second advertisement, which is for

“DNA labeling and detection products”, Neibart draws multiple copies of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting

Mona Lisa along with the headline: “Smile, Renaissance™ non-rad DNA labeling kits give you

reproducible results, not high backgrounds” (p. 157). By referencing Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Thirty

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Things Are Better Than One, Neibart’s drawing ironically comments upon reproduction, authenticity, and

“high” and “low” culture and their relationship to current biotechnologies (p. 158). Though the

juxtaposition of these themes, Neibart has turned the cloned Mona Lisa’s into reproducible commodities

just like many genetic practices have done to DNA (p. 156). Moreover, “Leonardo […] has been

appropriated for stories of origin, vision and its tools, scientific humanism, technical progress and universal

extension”, revealing the “technoscientific preoccupation with Leonardo and his brethren in the “degraded”

contexts of business self-representation, advertising inside the scientific community, science news

illustrations […] magazine cover art and comic humor” (p. 156).

Hence, despite the commonly held split between artistic and scientific culture, in much of Western

history these seemingly independent endeavors have been figured as consistent or complimentary

intellectual undertakings in certain incarnations. In the research by art historian Samuel Edgerton (1985),

he stresses visual arts influence on scientific practices by highlighting the effects that artistic scientific

illustrations have had on many prominent “modern” scientists. Edgerton writes,

It may have been of no small significance to their later contributions that the first generations of

‘modern’ scientists like Francis Bacon, Galileo, William Harvey and Descartes were also the first

to have before them as schoolboys scientific textbooks illustrated in the new renaissance chiaroscuro

[strong contrast between light and dark to cause the figure to stand out in the composition] and linear

perspective (1985, p. 169).

Likewise, in their book Objectivity, historians and critical theorists Daston & Galison (2007)

discuss the formidable influence of atlas illustrations on scientists in different epistemic trends and

historical periods. They profess, “Not only do images make the atlas; atlas images make science […] Atlas

maker’s woo, badger, and monopolize the finest artists available” (p. 23). They continue, “These images

affect scientists and how they learn how to see […] Atlases are intrinsically collective […] Almost all

[atlases] depend on a close working relationship between scientist and illustrator” (p. 26). While all of the

connections traced here between art and science highlight the importance of the visual focus for “proving”

certain physical and biological differences, it is almost too impossible to delineate art and science

throughout Western humanist ideology.

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3. Epistemic Trends: Creative Concords

and Radical Ruptures

Daston & Galison (2007) examine how different epistemologies affect how art and science inform

each other and how these have shifted dramatically throughout Western history. They expound upon several

different belief systems from the eighteenth to twentieth-century including “truth-to-nature”, “objectivity”,

and “trained judgment” which have affected how images are used, understood, and valued in science.

Nevertheless, while these “epistemic virtues” are characteristic of certain periods in Western science, the

boundaries between them cannot be clearly defined:

the emergence of objectivity as a new epistemic virtue in the mid-nineteenth century did not abolish

truth-to-nature, any more than trained judgment in the early twentieth century eliminated objectivity

[…] each successive stage presupposes and builds upon, as well as reacts to, the earlier ones (p. 18).

Likewise, the knowledge production practices before these trends directly affected their

development, and each system has affected how both are conceptualized today. “What passes through

history is not only the work done by generations, but the ‘sedimentation’ of that work is the condition of

arrival for future generations” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 40).

Before discussing the principles of “truth-to-nature”, the historian of art and science Pamela Smith

(2002) creates links between the material conditions of art, naturalism, and commerce in late–fifteenth to

sixteenth-century Europe. She states:

That a scientist would supplement his verbal description of the wonders he encountered, is one

obvious link between art, science, and commerce, but a more profound connection between these

three areas can be found in their intersection in the body in sensory observation and sensual

consumption, in the use of the senses to know nature, and in the sensory enjoyment of the things of

nature and art (p. 18).

During this time, there was only a limited separation between art and science in Europe. While

artisans and naturalists had different roles in society, they were both valued for producing visual knowledge

about nature and the world. As Smith (2002) asserts, “The formation of a new visual language would

eventually become an auxiliary tool of proof in the natural science” (p. 9). Artists, like naturalists, were

tasked with the role of recording, revealing and re-presenting the wonders of the world, such as “exotic”

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plants, lands, animals, insects, and people, to anxious consumers. Furthermore, Smith (2002) relays the

interconnections and interchangeability of art objects and nature, writing, “art and nature came to be closely

associated or even interchangeable between the 1490s and 1540s” (p. 65). This similitude allowed artists

considerable freedom; if one could adeptly craft one’s representations to appear “real”, the (re)-

presentation, in effect, became real: “The meditation on the boundary between nature and art sometimes

produced witty counterfeit images, such as Joris Hoefnagel’s imaginary insects that played with the

viewer’s presumptions about verisimilitude” (Smith, 2002, p. 11). For instance, in his painting, Dragonfly,

Pear, Carnation and Insect (1591), Joris Hoefnagel drew an imagined insect next to an actual depiction of

a dragonfly. Considering the relationship between art and naturalism in Europe and the creations made by

scientists/artists today, science is «no longer simply the story of what is “really” there» (Smith, 2002, p.

11).

Even though most of the scientists/artists working within these epistemic shifts were men (since

women were usually excluded), some women also forced open the doors and forged connections between

art and naturalism. For example, Maria Sibylla Merian traveled from her home in the Netherlands to draw

and study the lives of the insects in Surinam in 1699. For a women painter and naturalist to self-finance a

voyage to Surinam during this time with only her 21-year-old daughter as her assistant “to document the

metamorphosis of exotic butterfly and moths […] represents one of the most heroic acts in the history of

the natural sciences” (Kemp, 2004, p. 46). In Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam (1705), a painting

from this journey, she records the life cycle of the moth, Arsenure armida, as well as the plant that sustains

it (Kemp, 2004, p. 47). Kemp (2004) proclaims,

She is responsible for the forging of a new vision of how life cycles in insects could be brought

before our eyes […]The eggs, larvae, chrysalises, and mature insects are portrayed in living

communion with the plant on which their ‘worms’ feed—sometimes showing more than one species

per plate where she had observed that a plant was not the exclusive domain of one kind of insect

(pp. 46-7).

Thus, in her “visual journey through the wonders of transformation”, unlike many of her male

counterparts who focused on hierarchy and domination, Merian, who highlighted the beauty and

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cooperation involved in nature and criticizing the Dutch treatment the slaves on the colony, uses it as a

model for human behavior (Kemp, 2004, p. 47). Likewise, it comes as no surprise that she also stressed the

strength of the female sex in her art and observations: “Each year this kind of caterpillar comes three times

to this tree […] The lower and smaller one is the male; the larger and the upper one is the female” (Kemp,

2004, p. 47).

Like in sixteenth-century Europe, in the epistemic value of “truth-to-nature” (which took place in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), art and science are also inextricably linked as artists and scientists

worked together to create idealistic representations of nature. Working closely with the artists, scientists

would correct the “imperfections” and “blemishes” on the illustrations “to ensure the fidelity of their

images” (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 42). They expand, “To this end, they carefully selected their models,

watched their artists like hawks, and smoothed anomalies and variations in order to produce what we shall

call ‘reasoned images’” (p. 42). However, with the popularization of photography in the sciences in the

mid-nineteenth century, scientists reacted strongly against the perceived “subjectivity” of the truth-to-

nature and claimed that human intervention and idealization would “taint” the reliability of scientific

theories and allow expectations to affect results (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 34). Despite the recognition

of the connections between art and science during the Renaissance, during the Enlightenment, artists and

scientists started to understand their work as oppositional ventures: “Artists were exhorted to express, even

flaunt, their subjectivity, at the same time that scientists were admonished to restrain theirs” (Daston &

Galison, 2007, p. 37). Instead, objectivity became the new epistemic ideal in science, and scientists worked

hard to eliminate all traces of human involvement from their work at the same time that artists were required

to communicate their individuality through theirs (p. 37). As Daston & Galison (2007) state, “To be

objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice

or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving” (p. 17). Yet this ideal also came with a price as “incidental

oddities cluttered images; the objects depicted might not be typical of the class they were supposed to

represent” (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 43). Another consequence was the banality of the research it

produced. As Kemp (2004) explains of the images in Henry Gray’s and T Pick’s textbook Anatomy,

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Descriptive and Surgical (1893): “displaying elegant figure […] in gracious settings became the favoured

presentation in the erudite humanist picture books of anatomy, from Andreas Vesalius and Charles Estienne

in the Renaissance to Bernard Seigfried in the Enlightenment”, after that “the plain, technical textbook,

establishe[d] itself as the anatomical bible for generations of students” (p. 70). He argues that the style of

bland depiction was “epitomized by Henry Gray’s Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical” which “bids to be

the most remorselessly unexciting book ever written on an engaging subject” (pp. 70-71). Furthermore,

some mathematicians, physicists, and logicians, took objectivity even further too claim all images were

“subjective” and purged them from their work entirely (Kemp, 1992, p. 45). As Kemp (2004) elucidates,

“This reluctance to use visual images to demonstrate claims about the world came out of the Aristotelian

view that art and nature were opposed to one another” (p. 63). Yet strident “objectivity” also lost its

prominence in the early-twentieth century as scientists began to realize that strict objectivity was inefficient

and instead proposed the epistemology of “trained judgment” where scientists would enhance their images

to emphasize a point (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 46). However, the effects of objectivity still lingered on

for much longer. As Kemp reveals, the “the ‘non-style’—a technical mode of illustration in which dry

imparting of information is the sole conscious focus” was quite influential in the sciences, and “by 1850,

there was no branch of institutionalized science that remained untouched and much of twentieth-century

illustration was its direct heir” (Kemp, 2004, p. 70).

Ironically, despite these historical precedents, in the twentieth-century another shift took place and

the bifurcation between the arts and scientists reemerged. In the advent of the Cold War in the United States,

many people stopped looking at social and material relations of scientific knowledge and put blind faith in

science, technology and capitalism, which they hoped would “save” them from the Soviets and other “evil”

powers (Kemp, 1992, p. 16). Moreover, as scientific pursuits continued to gain prominence in academia,

scholars dedicated to studying the social conditions of science began to emerge and question the

“objectivity” of science and the white masculine norms it reinforced. Many of these scholars focused on

the social construction of scientific knowledge, which put scientists on the defensive. This tension led up

to the “Science Wars” (a period of academic hostility –even disdain– around the mid-1980s to the early-

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2000s), which was one of the most divisive events to happen between the sciences and the humanities in

Western history. Feminist theorist Sharon Begley (2001) reveals one of the “most notorious

counterpunch[es]” by scientists during the Science Wars in 1996 (p. 115). She writes,

Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University wrote a spoof of the “constructivist” argument, passed

it off as the real thing and duped the post-modern journal Social Text into publishing it. The editors'

gullibility, Sokal argued, revealed the bankruptcy of the constructivists' ideas (p. 115).

After this deceit, many constructivist scholars became more involved with the sciences and

scientists became more open to the role of culture in their research, but the bifurcation that occurred because

of this event is still far from being reconciled. Furthermore, Daston & Galison (2007) question what these

epistemologies signify in this second millennium when computer-generation and nanomanipulation,

controlling and creating matter and virtual images at a molecular level, are dominating scientific image

making (p. 383):

Representation is always an exercise in portraiture, albeit not necessarily one in mimesis. The prefix

re- is essential; images that strive for representation present again what already is. Representative

images may purify, perfect and smooth to get at being, at “what” is. But they may not create out of

whole cloth, crossing over from nature to art (p. 382).

One example of the creation sans mimesis, imitation or representation of something that already

exists is the work of William Latham, a former fellow at the IBM Scientific Centre at Winchester. Using

the design tool Mutator, Latham creates computer-generated and animated life forms “endowed with

genetic properties which shape their growth” (Kemp, 2004, p. 163). In his program, he allows these

sculptural-like creatures grow and interact within a set of boundaries in the likeness of the “processes of

natural selection” (Kemp, 2004, p. 163). The work of Latham provides one example of how contemporary

creations in art and science are taking the connections between science and art to a new level, perhaps one

that neither scientists nor artists are prepared. As Kemp (2004) explains,

Fractal processes of repeated division […] may be seen as ‘art’—just as Renaissance

drawings of the Platonic solids […] can be accorded aesthetic status—but they only inhabit

a limited domain in the wide domains already colonized by the visual arts (p. 162).

Undeniably, despite the shifts in the consciousness about the role of images in the sciences, visual

representations have been one of the main ways that modern scientists learn about previous scientific

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knowledge, and this has affected how these scientists practice science and artists practice art. Jones (2003)

reveals, “Visual culture […] has been aimed at breaking down disciplinary limitations defining what and

how visual imagery is to be analyzed within a critical visual practice” (p. 1). Whether or not scientists value

their connections with art or artists realize their connections with the sciences, the formative relationship

between them exists: “Nature, knowledge, and knower intersect in these images, the visible traces of a

world made intelligible” (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 53). All these epistemologies still circulate currently

—whether it is the connection between truth-to-nature’s illustration of an unblemished flower,

contemporary genetics’ creation of an unblemished apple or objectivity’s assertion that science can detach

itself from culture. By analyzing the connections between visual culture and other fields, these disciplinary

lines can be broken down to produce more interdisciplinary knowledge. Furthermore, there are many real

world implications of different relationships between the visual and the scientific in different epistemic

trends: the drawing of a live vivisection by Vesalius (1543) serving as a representation of objectivity,

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing The Vitruvian Man (1487) representing “truth to nature”, Carl Linnaeus’

publication Philosophica Botanica (1797) revealing “trained judgment”, and 1899 Louis-Ernest Barrias’s

sculpture Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1899) demonstrating the passive display of the female

body for the visual pleasures of science. Likewise, Jeff Hutchen’s photograph of the Vhevenda tribe virgins

in South Africa (2004) can be said to represent trained judgment, even though it also connects to the

illustrations of Sara Baartman body as scientific proof of the inferiority of Africans (early 1800s) or

Dickinson’s illustrations of the genitals of homosexuals (1948) which would all fall under the epistemology

of objectivity. Throughout the next sections, this paper discusses how these examples and more worked to

construct the liberal human ideal at the exclusion of others.

4. Co-Construction of an exclusionary Liberal Humanism

Even when it is more readily acknowledged that art and science shape each other and transform

what questions are asked and projects are created, the liberal humanist ideology behind particular projects

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and visions is not deconstructed enough; on the contrary, it is often reified through this research. For

example, Kemp (2004) discusses the connections between art and science but rarely offers any critical

commentary on the consequences of this relationship. While Kemp’s assertion that “The artist and scientist

both live within and play active roles in constructing human mental and physical landscapes” proves true,

his non-critical discussion of how “wonderful” the institutions are that have developed via the sciences

merits evaluation (Kemp, 2004, p. 7). He writes, “What is surprising and wonderful is how these institutions

have manifested themselves in the works of innovative scientists in culturally apposite ways” (p. 7).

Considering much of the unfortunate history of Western science towards women, minorities, and non-

human nature, his un-selective enthusiasm is questionable. For instance, Kemp writes about Vesalius, a

French anatomist and illustrator in the 1800s, who drew the board and tools he used for dissections to prove

the “veracity” of his illustrations (1543), yet only briefly mentions that Vesalius also drew this board with

“an unfortunate pig tethered to its rings and apertures” while “performing the vivisection” (p. 23). Whereas

Kemp titled his two-page discussion of Vesalius’ work “Vesalius’ Veracity”, the section could be called

“Vesalius’ Vivisection” (p. 22). In addition, while the work of queer theorists Foucault and Ahmed situate

this paper, Kemp situates his book with a quote by Francis Bacon on the “essential apparatus of a learned

gentlemen” —and the “learned gentleman” (p. 1): hence, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-upper

class and European— i.e. the quintessential Liberal Human Subject in opposition to inferior “other”. Like

most ideologies, although liberal humanism refers to certain concepts and principles, it is not a unified

belief system and has taken different meanings in various historical eras. One could argue that its ideals

originate with Aristotle; however, liberal human ideology most notably developed during the late

Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution (1600-1700s). As Haraway (1997) writes, “The Italian

Renaissance and modernist paintings are signs of the culture of Western Humanism, which in kinship with

the Scientific Revolution […] not to mention its class location in the rising bourgeoisie, whose fate was

tied to science and technology” (p. 155). Accordingly, the philosophies of Francis Bacon are considered to

represent many of the values of liberal humanism including faith in rationality, progress, objectivity, and

the control and mastery of nature. Bacon is known as one of the principal philosophers of the Scientific

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Revolution (a period of scientific revitalization after the middle-ages), yet during the Scientific Revolution

(through the influence of philosophers like Bacon), control, dominance, and masculinity were imposed as

scientific ideals. As Lederman & Bartsch (2001) write, “Bacon’s language to describe Man’s domination

over nature uses ‘bold sexual imagery’; his words reinforce the female not only as an object, but as an

object for exploitation” (p. 65). For example, relating the investigation of the secrets of nature to the

investigation of witches during the Inquisition, Bacon declares,

a useful light may be gained, not for a true judgment of the offenses of persons charged with such

practices, but likewise for further disclosing the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make

scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his

whole object (as cited in Merchant, 2001, p. 69).

The Baconian emphasis on control and power over nature was often expressed through sexual (and

racial) imagery, including the use of loaded words such as “rape”, “slave”, and “bound into service”, and

thus, his philosophies played a pivotal role in scientific experimentation thereafter. For instance, Robert

Boyle, a theologian and scientist who was influenced by Bacon, created a vacuum through the use of an air

pump, while gleefully watching birds fall from flight as he sucked the oxygen out of the room to

demonstrate his discovery. In addition, he also referred to nature as both an object and a woman, stressing

that “the empire of man” has mastery “over the inferior creatures of God”, which included humans that he

viewed as “closer to nature,” such women and people of color (Boyle as cited in Keller, 2001, p. 104)

Another prominent figure in the Scientific Revolution was the French philosopher Rene Descartes,

who gained prominence just a little after Bacon. Descartes strove “to create a unified system of knowledge

base in pure reason […] For him, it was an epistemological problem to relate the thinking self (res cogitans)

with the external world (res extensa)” (Lederman & Bartsch, 2001, p. 65). He believed that the mind and

body were separate entities and the mind was superior; in fact, the mind was all that ‘mattered’ for

Descartes. Hence, he believed one should use deductive reasoning to test hypotheses about nature and the

external world in scientific experimentation. As Kemp writes,

Given the prominence of empirical analysis in so many sciences during the ‘Scientific Revolution,’

it is not surprising that some artists were able to play an active role in the dialogue between various

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types of seeing and knowing, not only in the obvious areas of illustration but also in the more

searching evocation of the causes behind natural effects (2004, p. 6)

Likewise, Descartes used vivid illustrations with detailed characters and landscapes (i.e. “his

analysis of binocular vision and the inverted image on the retina of a blind man with a pair of sticks”) to

express his theories in visual terms (Kemp, 2004, p. 39). While Descartes understood that images added

another dimension to his theories, he also stressed “illustration by mechanical device was a limited device”

and “scolded those who viewed his vivid aids to visualization in too obvious a way” (Kemp, 2004, p. 39).

Despite the claims by humanist and Enlightenment thinkers, nature is not just passively waiting for

science to discover and “unveil” her, and the Cartesian dualisms of nature/culture, man/woman,

mind/matter, etc. are cultural constructions designed to keep those that benefit from the dualisms in power.

As Smith (2002) avers, “They themselves had to gain social authority in order to formulate a picture of the

real” (p. 14). Similarly, the idealization of the “liberal human subject”, has worked to police the boundaries

of “the human” by normalizing the European male body and justifying different forms of oppression against

those that do not inhabit this body.

For instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1487) exemplifies

this liberal humanist ideology. To this day, in Western culture, the Vitruvian Man is considered to be the

“universal” man, yet it is not by chance that the “the perfect man” happens to be a close fit to liberal

humanist scientists and artists that purported it, which creates an unobtainable norm for most. Hence, the

following sections examine the damage caused by liberal humanist ideology to people in different identity

categories including gender, race, sexuality, and ability.

5. Women, Science, and The Male Gaze

In certain paradigmatic intersections between Western art and science gender is repeatedly

inscribed through visual means by both disciplines. As Jones (2003) writes, “Feminism has long

This is similar to what Audre Lorde (2005) refers to a “the mythical norm.” She writes, “In America, this norm is

usually defined as white, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm

that the trappings of power reside within this society” (p .339).

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acknowledged that visuality (the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see) is one of the

key modes by which gender is culturally inscribed in Western culture” (p. 1). For instance, in the language

of Bacon and Boyle, nature is commonly gendered as female, while culture is associated with masculinity.

As ecofeminist theorist Ortner states in “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” (2000), “since it is

always culture’s project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then

culture would find it ‘natural’ to subordinate, not to say oppress, them” (p. 245). Likewise, since women

have been relegated to the status of “nature”, they have also been denied access to the scientific institutions

that oppress them because of their perceived “fragility” and “subjectivity”: in sum, as nature, they are said

to not have the mind for science. While some women did break these barriers (i.e. Marie Curie in the early-

1900s and Lise Meitner in the mid-1900s) paving the way for women in the sciences today, many remnants

of the masculinist liberal humanist ideals still exist account for the vast under-representation of women in

the sciences.

Yet even when women like Maria Sibylla Merian did break these barriers, the knowledge they

discovered was often devalued or destroyed. For instance, the Schiebinger (2004a) notes that on Merian’s

voyage to Surinam, she discovered a plant known as the peacock flower that was used as an abortifacient

by the slave women of Surinam (p. 5). Moreover, she stressed that the plant was used for the women’s

“physical and spiritual survival”, writing that “the Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters,

use the seeds […] to ‘abort’ their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are” (in

Schiebinger, 2004a, p. 3). Furthermore, in her notes, she gives the slave women agency by humanizing

them (which most Dutch travelers and colonizers worked to dehumanize) noting that slaves told her

themselves that they “sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly” (p. 3). Yet the

knowledge of this plant and its uses for terminating pregnancy or the violence imposed on the slaves by the

Dutch colonizers was never made publicly available in Europe since many of Merian’s male

contemporaries, such as Michel Descourtilz, “[stressed] the ‘ill-intentions’ of the ‘negresses’ who used

them” (Schiebinger, 2004a, p. 3). In addition, since abortion was commonly practiced by midwives and

women, to male physicians who were only called when the abortion went wrong “abortifacients appeared

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dangerous” (Schiebinger, 2004a, p. 5). Obviously, they also gave women considerable freedom over their

own bodies and reproduction, which threatened male authority and control. Furthermore, it is remarkable

that Merian was even able to make this voyage with her daughter since there was an “often-expressed fear

that […] the intense African sun […] produced black babies regardless of the parents’ complexion” and

“that white women taken to warm climates succumbed to ‘copious menstruations, which almost always

ends […] in fatal hemorrhages of the uterus” (Schiebinger, 2004a, p. 4). These and other allegations about

women’s bodily fragility “[unmask] the claim the science is gender neutral and [underscore] how gender

inequalities have been built into the production and structure of knowledge itself” (Schiebinger, 2004a, p.

2).

As discussed, women have often been precluded from the sciences because of their perceived

passivity and fragility. For example, women were not able to conduct any research that involved sexuality,

including animal behavior, anatomy, etc., Kemp (2004) explains, “For centuries the study of flowers and

the cultivation of gardens were deemed safe pursuits for young ladies. The behavior of animals, by contrast,

was too likely to provoke difficult questions about sexuality” (p. 48). Yet in 1751, Carl Linnaeus’

publication, Philosophica Botanica brought the study of plants into question for women as well because of

his “sexual system [of] classification […] based on stamens and pitons” (p. 48). Furthermore, in 1797,

Robert Thorton produced an illustrated book of Linnaeus’ work including “romantic pictures of plants in

evocative landscapes and highly charged allegories of nature” (p. 49). The “obscene” illustrations of the

reproductive organs of plants distressed the religious and conservative groups of the time who warned

against exposing young women to his work (p. 49).

As mentioned before, when some of the historical connections in Western art and science are

examined, the ways in which visual imagery inscribes gender onto bodies and society becomes apparent.

For instance, in 1899 Louis-Ernest Barrias completed the sculpture Nature Unveiling Herself Before

See Londa Scheibinger’s book Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World for a more

extensive analysis of gender, science, and abortifacients.

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Science (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 244). In this piece commissioned by the French government, a woman

with her eyes turned down in modesty erotically reveals her breasts to the viewers. Feminist theorist Mulvey

(1999) explains this phenomenon about visual representations of women, writing:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and

passive/female. The determining gaze projects fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled

accordingly […] with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be

said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (pp. 47-8).

In this sculpture, woman as nature is put on display to fulfill the desires of the (scientific) male

gaze. Versalius’ front piece to Epitome also exemplifies the passive display of the female body for the

visual pleasures of science:

The picture [is] […] an assertion of male power to know the female body and hence to know and

control a feminine Nature. Vesalius presides here over an assemblage of men who peer into a

woman’s helpless, naked, and revealed body before them […] her generative organs more clearly

shown, her face mysteriously veiled so as to emphasize the accessibility to her body to the male

gaze (Laqueur, 1990, p. 73).

As such, nature and bodies are commonly confronted and known through dissections, which are

made visible to the public through illustrations, photographs, and other forms of visualization. Yet the

process of visualizing is not just about optics but is rather a gestalt, or way of seeing and representing the

world (including sex and gender). A case in point is the portrayal of the vagina as an inverted penis or the

one-sex model in which the male is the standard. This model of human genitalia was purported by

Renaissance anatomists, such as Vesalius in De humani corporis fabrica [On the fabric of the human body]

(1543). In the one-sex-model, men and women are understood as having the same sexual organ; the only

difference was that the women’s was on the inside. Yet after the Renaissance, the two-sex model displaced

this older model. Furthermore, in the two-sex model, many scientists argued that sexual organs (or more

currently, genetics) dictate gender behavior and, thus, justify precluding women from the sciences. For

instance, the medical philosopher, Pierre Roussel argued in 1803 that “The soft parts which are part of the

female constitution […] also manifest differences which enable one to catch a glimpse of the functions to

which woman is called, and the passive state to which nature has destined her” (in Jordanova, 1989, p. 27).

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Even though it seems these ideas from the past about sexual difference have little influence on

current conceptions of gender, these essentialist arguments are still being perpetuated. For instance,

Lawrence Summers, the former President of Harvard, insinuated that women do not have the same innate

ability as men in the sciences during a speech he gave at a conference. He asserted, “Research in behavioral

genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren't due to socialization

after all” (Bombardieri, 2005, p. 1). So, the technologies of gender “the process of ‘bringing forth” or

‘[making] something appear […] has produced the conditions of women in the sciences today” (Ahmed,

2007, p. 46). It is not that women were/are not orientated for science, since women, such as midwives, have

been practicing and passing down scientific knowledge for centuries. In fact, they often surpassed the skills

of the men, which was often why they were considered “witches”. Rather much of Western science has

othered and objectified women’s bodies and creating an inhospitable environment for women. As Ahmed

(2006) writes, “Objects, as well as spaces, are made for some kinds of bodies more than others” (p. 51).

6. Racism, Orientalism, and Imperial Power

Like with any discipline, it impossible to think about biological science or nature without

understanding the racial and sexual histories of Western culture. For instance, as with women, nature has

also been used as a rationalization for the exploitation and oppression of Third-world, the global south and

indigenous people. Contemporarily, Western culture is still fascinated with using visuality as a model for

representing and constructing notions of difference and creating binaries divisions between

civilized/primitive and nature/culture. For instance, in the popular magazine National Geographic,

photography is commonly used to reveal the “otherness” of indigenous people to curious Western

consumers. For example, in a photograph by Dan Westergren (2009), the Maasai tribesmen are shown

inspecting the photographer’s camera (which is used as a symbol of Western culture), and this juxtaposition

For a more thorough discussion of the implications of Western science on women see Londa Schiebinger’s book

Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (2004b).

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is meant to cast the tribesman as the “primitive” other. Furthermore, in the photograph of the Vhevenda

tribe virgins in South Africa, Jeff Hutchens (2004) portrays the women as sexual objects for the Western

male gaze by erotically focusing on their buttocks and cutting off the other parts of their bodies. This focus

on portraying Third-World and indigenous “difference” and putting the people of color on display is not

new to Western culture. One of the most notable examples in this horrendous history is the story of Saartjie

Baartman, who was known as the Hottentot Venus. Saartjie Baartman was a slave from the Khoikhoi tribe,

who was taken from her home in South Africa and brought to England in 1810 and later to France. In

England and France, she was forced to reveal her nude body to Europeans fascinated by her large buttocks

and elongated labia. During these exhibitions, multiple illustrations of her body were created and circulated

throughout Europe, often using her body as scientific proof of the inferiority and uninhibited sexuality of

Africans. Gilman (2003) writes:

Buffon commented on the lascivious, apelike sexual appetite of the black, introducing into a

commonplace of early travel literature into a “scientific” context. He stated that this animal-like

sexual appetite went so far as to lead black women to copulate with apes […]The black [woman]

occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity […]The antithesis of

European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the black, and the essential black, the lowest rung

on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot (p. 139).

Only five years after being taken from her home, examined, and exhibited all over England and

France, Saartjie died at age twenty-six. Saartjie was not the only non-European to be exhibited and studied

for Western entertainment and “scientific” pursuits. In the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, many other

ethnic were put on display in zoological gardens, where they were fenced in like animals in order to stress

their “exotic otherness” and demonstrate the “superiority” of white Europeans and the inferiority of black

Africans and “explained the Europeans' right to conquest and rule as well as their exploitation and

oppression of the Africans” (Jonassohn, 2000, p. 40). The tragic story of Saartjie Baartman and the others

displayed in human zoos reveal how racism and orientalism connect through imperial science in Early

Modern Europe:

the pursuit of imperial power and the desire for domination over nature and peoples and their

exploitation for income is integral to the construction of a new mode of relationality; one that

stressed eye witnessing, close observation, group judgment and evaluation of information, and the

disciplining of subjects (Smith, 2002, p. 17).

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Furthermore, illustrations by European naturalists created a new sort of commodity fetish in

Europe. People had a thrust for knowledge about the unknown, and the paintings and drawings by

naturalists and explorers served as a mark of power over nature and people, which made the “exotic”

imagery widely coveted. For instance in 1515, three-hundred years prior to Saartjie Baartman being taking

from her homeland and exhibited, the painter, printmaker, and theorist Albretch Dürer created a woodcut

of an Indian rhinoceros that belonged to a powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon. Even though he

had never actually seen the rhinoceros and his illustration was anatomically incorrect, his drawing was

believed to be an accurate representation of a rhinoceros and was widely reproduced for centuries. As Smith

(2002) states, Dürer’s representation “[articulates] the importance of art in rendering knowledge visible for

an audience fascinated by nature […] They needed to see these strange and different things in order to

comprehend them fully” (p. 7). Dürer fulfilled the public’s desire to see an exotic animal and get a glimpse

of “the Orient” —commonly thought of as “not Europe” and romanticized as mysterious and sensual

(Ahmed, 2007, p. 114). As post-colonial theorist Said writes in Orientalism (1977), “The Orient was almost

a European invention and been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and

landscapes, remarkable experiences” (p. 1).

As discussed with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Albretch Dürer also “shared with Leonardo the quest

for an art that would be ‘universal’; that is to say, one that constructs representations of all forms in nature

on the basis of a profound understanding of natural philosophy” (Kemp, 2004, p. 14). Kemp continues,

“When portraying human beings, Dürer considered that the mental and physical constitutions of each

individual were to be systematically expressed in terms of Renaissance theories of psychology and

physiology” (p. 14). It is common practice in Western science to use the body as a sign of the “nature” of

humanity. Kemp expounds upon Dürer’s views on physiognomy (the study of personalities via physical

features of the body), by explaining the profound impact that Dürer’s characterization of individual

temperaments based on human proportions had on “not only on physiognomics but also on nineteenth

century sciences of phrenology, craniologist, and eugenics” (p. 15). He continues to assert the remnants of

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these observations are still experienced stating, “We all act as amateur physiognomists, however often our

initial reaction to someone’s ‘look’ is confounded” (p. 15) and almost 500 years later, little has changed.

For instance, the ABC news shows Good Morning America provides one contemporary example of the

insights of physiognomy in a segment that claimed that the shape of one’s nose could reveal one’s dominant

personality traits (Goodman, 2008). This is similar to the claims made by mid-1800s anthropometric

proponents who claimed the measurement and mapping of the human face determined intellect, which had

disastrous gendered and racial implications. Yet, like in much of Western science, what this ABC segment

(Goodman, 2008) really purported was racial stereotypes disguised as scientific fact. For example, the

segment aligned having a bulbish-tip nose with having a preoccupation with saving. So, in other words, one

could take this inference to mean that if you have a Jewish nose, then you must be “cheap”. This study is

simply a scientific ruse to reinforce racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes and make Jewish people feel guilty

for any form of success they achieve (which has often led many Jewish people, particularly women, to

undergo plastic surgery to “fix” their noses). In addition, the segment also maintained that having a broad

nose means that one has a powerful sex drive, which, just like the colonial scientists’ racist claims,

associates people of African descent with sexual promiscuity and danger. Nonetheless, many of the viewers

of this show may have believed this “research” on noses, just like people believed Dürer’s rhinoceros was

anatomically correct in nineteenth-century Europe.

7. Eugenics, Queer Bodies, and Disability

The word “eugenics” comes originates from Greek words “eu” (well) and “genes” (born) and

promotes the idea of a superior humanity by preventing “undesirable” people from procreating or being

born. People have been conditioned to react to people who seem foreign or “other” from themselves with a

mixture of fear and fascination. As Audre Lorde (2005) writes, “We have no patterns for relating across

our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the

service of separation and confusion” (p. 338). This section discusses how human differences have been

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used in eugenic practices and how these practices relate to disability and queer

politics in the past and

present. The term eugenics refers to a set of beliefs about the ideal human form and sets up different ways

of achieving this goal in different historical locations. As feminist theorists Araujo & Sommer (2002)

explain, “Eugenic practice includes the systematic elimination of so-called ‘undesirable’ biological traits

and the use of selective breeding to ‘improve’ the characteristics of an organism or species” (p. 165). They

continue, “One branch of eugenics held that the rich and powerful were genetically superior to the poor,

and that whites were in general superior to other races. Such a philosophy has provided a convenient

justification for a system of structuring inequalities” (p. 165). The branches of eugenics discussed here

claim that one sexuality, body type, and ability status is superior to other sexualities, body types, and ability

statuses and that anyone who does not meet these standards should be eliminated.

With scientific authorities asserting such dangerous claims, it is no surprise that the British

anthropologist Sir Francis Galton developed the field of eugenics in 1883, which quickly spread to the

United States (where it was advocated by prominent men such as Carnegie). In the early 1900s, eugenics

was already becoming a major force in U.S. social policies, and by 1907 “sixteen states [had adopted]

sterilization laws for ‘socially inadequate biological varieties’” (Araujo & Sommer, 2002, p. 165).

Furthermore, eugenicists’ in Nazi Germany from the 1920s were citing the U.S. as a source of inspiration

for their eugenic practices:

a leading advocate of eugenics in Germany at the time remark[ed], ‘What we racial hygienists

promote is not at all new or unheard of. In a cultural nation of the first order, the United States of

America, that which we strive toward was introduced long ago’ (Araujo & Sommer, 2002, p.

166).

Along with atrocities suffered by the Jews, Poles, and Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled were

also among the eleven to twenty-one million people to be tortured and slaughtered by the Nazis, and even

Like Ahmed (2007), this paper employs the word “queer” for several reasons: “First, I [use] ‘queer’ as a way of

describing what is ‘oblique’ or ‘off line’” (p. 161). Likewise, the term “queer” is used “to describe specific sexual

practices. Queer in this sense would refer to those who practice nonnormative sexualities (Jagose, 1996), which as

we know involves a personal and social commitment to living in an oblique world” (p. 161). In other words, queer to

refer to those who deviate from societal norms, particularly in regards to sexuality, and celebrate their existence on

the margins.

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after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, homosexuals were then forced into military prisons.

Furthermore, the Nazis also often constructed racist and ableist visual illustrations and diagrams of Jews

and the disabled and taught this propaganda as scientific fact in children’s textbooks and to the general

population (Ritter, 2019).

Like the Jews, in these eugenic discourses, homosexuals and the disabled were often referred to as

lower beings on the evolutionary chain, much like non-Europeans and the lower classes (both in the US in

the 1900s as well as in Nazi Germany in the mid-1900s). By dismissing “queers” and “crips” in this way,

scientists legitimized scrutinizing their bodies, locking them up in hospitals and jails, and attempting to

eliminate them from society while maintaining the European upper-class, heterosexual, able-bodied male

as the pinnacle of humanity. Consequently,

The bodies and behaviors of prostitutes, thieves, vagabonds, and the ‘feebleminded’ were examined,

measured, and classified as evolutionary throw-backs or degenerates […]What they were presumed

to share with other atavistic groups, including people of non-European origins and animals, were

biologically innate and inherited characterizes that placed them on a lower rank in the order of

human beings (Terry, 1999, p. 32).

Furthermore, even early-twentieth century women’s suffragists were linked with criminals (and

thus “degenerates”), and in 1869 the German physician Karl Westphal expressed a similar theory about

people with “contrary sexual instinct[s]” (Terry, 1999, p. 32). As feminist theorist Terry (1999) reveals,

“During the second half of the nineteenth century […] the homosexual was viewed as having many of the

same characteristics that distinguished ‘primitive’ races from their ‘advanced’ European heterosexual

counterparts, namely degeneracy, atavism, regression, and hypersexuality” (p. 36). In addition, people with

disabilities were also conflated with other “sub-standard” humans, such as homosexuals and non-

Europeans. For instance, in 1867, just two years before Westphal theorized about the primitiveness of

sexual ‘deviants’, the German scientist Carl Vogt made a similar allegation about developmentally disabled

people. He wrote, “Microcephalics represent an earlier developmental state of human being […] they reveal

to us in of the milestones which human passed by during the course of his historical evolution” (in Clare,

1999, p. 80).

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Likewise, in the U.S. eugenics was used as justification for the sterilization of around 60,000

number of disabled individuals and people of color in the early to mid-1900s (Stern, 2021, p. 1). Even

Margaret Sanger, a feminist who is celebrated for being a pioneer for women’s reproductive choices, used

eugenics as a way to legitimate birth control; she claimed that it would allow “more children from the fit

and less from the unfit” (Araujo & Sommer, 2002, p. 166). Thus, considering this history, it is no surprise

that the term eugenics is met with much fear and animosity currently, yet the practices of early eugenicists

continue, hiding under the guise of genetics and new reproductive technologies. For example, to this day,

donated eggs and sperm are assiduously screened, and the more desirable the characteristics of the donor

(in relation to the intelligence, looks, etc.), the more money the “sperm” and “eggs” are worth. Moreover,

gay men and disabled individuals are not permitted to donate sperm or eggs. In addition, a prenatal mother

can also opt to undergo genetic screening to see if the fetus is at risk of developing a disability. Since a

mother can screen for genetic predisposition for disabilities in a fetus, could mothers screen for a

homosexual predisposition as well if scientists located a “gay gene”. Realities such as these reveal why

“queers” and “crips” have developed counter-identities that resist the bigotry of mainstream culture. As

queer and disability theorist Eli Clare (1999) proclaims, “Queer and cripple are cousins; words to shock,

words to infuse with pride and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics”

(p. 70).

As with gender and race, visuality is used to “prove” the “inferiority” of homosexuals as well. As

Terry (1999) writes, “Through techniques of clinical surveillance and diagnosis, homosexual bodies […]

were the objects to be measured, zones to be mapped, and texts to be interpreted” (p. 41). For instance, in

1935, the city of New York completed a scientific study on homosexuality called “The Committee for the

Study of Sex Variants” (Terry, 1999, p. 178). This study attempted to uncover the “truth” about

homosexuality and prove the “perversity” of the growing homosexual population in New York. The study

was conducted through a variety of methods including photography, psychoanalysis, endocrinology, and

psychometric testing (a newer version of anthropometrics theories), and the subjects consisted of volunteers

who were self-avowed homosexuals, both men and women (Terry, 1999, p. 178). In the study, one of the

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scientists, Robert Dickinson, strove to prove that there was a biological basis for homosexuality, including

differences in the genitals of heterosexuals and homosexuals: “Dickinson’s sketches illustrate how

scientific practices of close observation and detailed recording bolstered the authority of the study’s scopic

regime” (Terry, 1999, p. 203). Terry discusses how Dickinson had claimed that lesbians manifested

“abnormal” female genitalia:

Regardless of the absence of a heterosexual control group, ten typical characteristics of lesbians

were established, which […] distinguished their genitals from those of “normal women.” […]

Pejorative adjectives such as wrinkled, thickened, and protruding connoted excess [and

hypersexuality] and literally marked the subjects as pathological, while the normal unmarked female

was represented in unmodified terms (Terry, 1999, p. 203).

Much like in the truth to nature regime, many of the generalizations made by Dickinson on the

physical characteristics of homosexuals were not consistent within his study, yet “in an attempt to draw

composite sex variant body, variations among subjects were homogenized in favor of a stereotypical

construction of sexual inversion” (Terry, 1999, p. 210).

Unlike Dickinson who searched for the biological roots of /sexual variance’ through reproductive

organs, many scientists today are still searching for the “cause” of homosexuality through the study of

genetics and the brain. For instance, in 1993 Simon Levay, a self-proclaimed homosexual neuroscientist

from the Salk Institute in San Diego, California wrote the book The Sexual Brain where he claims to have

found structural differences in the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men (Nimmons, 1994, p. 1). He

conducted post-mortem examinations on brains, asserting a region of the brain called the interstitial nuclei

of the anterior hypothalamus is on average two or three times bigger in heterosexual men than it is in women

(Nimmons, 1994, p. 1). However, his study also had limitations, most notably that he conducted most of

his exams on men who had died of AIDS and did not find the same biological evidence for homosexuality

in women (Nimmons, 1994, p. 1). Likewise, before Dickinson and Levay even began their research,

European scientists also often cited the brain as the biological root of homosexuality. For example, in 1886,

the German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebing claimed that homosexual degeneration started in the brain and nervous

system (Terry, 1999, p. 46). As Terry asserts:

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Scientific claims that European gentleman had larger brain sizes than both their female counterparts

and savage men appeared about the same time that scientists noted the extraordinary large penises

of primitive men…homosexual men were imagined as embodying the worst of both savages and

women; while they were insatiable in their sexual pursuits and frivolously emotional, they lacked

the modesty of bourgeois women and the primal strength of savage men” (1999, p. 35).

Hence, in the history of Western culture, homosexuals have been figured as either diseased beings

(who should be pitied not criminalized), amoral criminals (who should be locked up), or as degenerates

(who should be eliminated), which still affects current research about the “causes” of homosexuality today.

Much like in the human zoos, people with disabilities were also exhibited in dehumanizing ways:

The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization […]During [the mid-1800s to

mid-1990s], freak shows populated the United States […]They came to gawk at freaks, savages, and

geeks […]They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, superior and inferior […]

confirmed and strengthened […] Disabled people, both white people and people of color, became

Armless Wonders, Frog Men, Giants, Midgets, Pinheads, Camel Girls […]and the like (Clare, 1999,

p. 71).

Moreover, during these freak shows, eugenic discourses were often espoused, and individuals with

diseases, genetic variations, or other marks of “difference” were displayed as nature’s mistakes. However,

one should not completely dismiss the agency of participants in these shows. As Clare (1999) illustrates,

“Like prostitutes, the people who worked as freaks—especially those who had some control over their own

display—grasped an exploitative situation in an exploitative world and […] turned it to their benefit” (p.

79). Thus, no matter how insignificant it may seem, the moments of subversion, resistance, and agency

should not be ignored or dismissed. He writes, “When a people’s collective history includes dehumanizing

medical textbook photographs, forced sterilizations, pity fests masquerading as charity, and an asexuality

so deeply ingrained into our bodies and institutionalized in the world that it feels impossible to shake”

(1999, p. 116), those moments and acts of resistance are sometimes the only things that get people through.

For example, in the mid-1800s, B. Frank Palmer, an amputee from childhood, designed his own prosthetic

leg because he was disgusted with the simple “peg leg” that he had worn since childhood. He created a

complex knee joint with pulleys and springs allowing the amputee to walk more naturally (Mitchell &

Snyder, 2000, p. 80). Through his invention, he both normalized himself by creating a more “natural”

walking leg and resisted the stereotype of the dependent and powerless disabled person, which has provided

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amputees (if they can afford it) with the ability to choose from an array of prosthetics limbs in different

colors and styles, including bionic and computerized to limbs. Clare (1999) reflects,

I think of the words crip, queer, freak, redneck. None of these are easy words. They mark the jagged edge

between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and

how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile (p. 11).

In such, scientific knowledge and its representations affect the material reality of those

adjected from the hegemonic culture and how these people view themselves and their own worth.

Accordingly, this provides great responsible to correct representations of the past and provide new

understandings of difference outside the discourse of superiority and inferiority.

8. Bridging the Divide: Visions for The Future

In sum, this critical biography has exposed an idealization of a particular and exclusionary “liberal

human subject” that has been upheld in various historical moments in Western art and science. In the

moments of intersection revealed in this paper, Western art and science have worked together to “prove”,

often visually, the inferiority of women, people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities who

have been relegated to the non-human, the almost human, the monstrous, or the animal. Currently, a new

ever-evolving, heterogenous, scientific-artistic paradigm exists which still carries the legacy of its past but

also breaks from it in many ways. In this current epistemic shift, science and art seem less concerned with

“revealing” inferiority of other humans “objectively” but many manifestations of science/art are still

involved in the co-creation of an idealized “perfection” of human subjects through genetic modification

(including art that engages with science and technology and that which critiques/questions it from an ethical

standpoint). As new cloning, robotic, and gene-altering technologies are being produced, they raise new

ethical questions for delimiting and defining the human and the non and/or sub-human which affect art,

science, philosophy, politics and societies. For instance, in April 2021, scientists successfully created

human-monkey embryos in the United States (Subbaraman, 2021) and, in 2017 in Saudi Arabia, a robot

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named Sophia was given citizenship (Katz, 2017), both of which introduce complex questions about human

rights. On the other hand, in 2020, the MoMA, held an “immersive experience of somatic, auditory and

visual engagement” combining art and neuroscience so people could reflect upon “issues around racial

justice, climate change, and the ongoing pandemic” and “to highlight the importance of exercising our

agency to vote” (p. 1). As such, in this new epistemic paradigm, scientists no longer perform live

vivisections to show “veracity” but instead mutate pig genes to make them glow in the dark (Ramprasath,

2013) or create rats that can grow human ears (Briggs, 2013). For instance, the 2019 Netflix documentary

Unnatural Selection (Kaufman & Engender) highlights new technologies in genetic engineering, their

potentials and dangers, and discusses how bio-hackers struggle to increase access to these technologies so

anyone can practice genetic engineering merging art, science, and visual culture once again. In this, the

creative and dynamic potential between art and science can inextricably alter the world yet whether

positively or negatively depends on where the power is situated to create and employ these resources. It is

precisely by exposing the shaky ground and imagined boundaries that many tenets of liberal humanism are

founded upon that enables feminist scientists, historians, and artists to subvert current constructions of

humanism and produce more favorable constructions in their place. As feminist scientist Deboleena Roy

writes in Molecular Feminisms (2018):

Doing science in our backyards could include setting up local science shops where experts from a

diverse range of knowledge bases come together, through a shared common interest, to solve local

problems. It could involve creating feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial technoscience salons

where academics learn to bring their research into interdisciplinary conversations. It could involve

creating shared community maker spaces that prioritize the involvement of typically marginalized

groups. It could even involve setting up interdisciplinary mentoring structures that support the

radical act of having feminist scientists practice both their science and their feminism at the lab

bench (p. 206)

Hence, feminists can with science and art as critical political projects with transformative and

liberatory potential or they can be used to reify and augment power practices already in play. In sum,

drawing attention to the fact that “the human” has been a shifting and unstable signifier reveals how “the

human” (in its current incarnations) has never and still does not exist, opening up new possibilities for

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formulating how humanity is defined and where, when, and how boundaries are drawn. As feminist/queer

theorists Halberstam & Livingston (1995) write,

The human functions to domesticate and hierarchize difference within the human (whether

according to race, class, gender) and to absolutize difference between human and nonhuman. The

posthuman does not reduce difference-form-others to difference-from-self, but rather emerges in the

pattern of resonance and interference between the two (p. 10).

The question humanity must answer is the signification of the “post”: does it, like Halberstam &

Livingston posit, mark a rupture from humanism and offer hope for more equitable configurations? Or is it

simply continuation and amplification of the story of Man already told? Perhaps, it is a combination: a

future already passed and yet to be written.

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