Technologies of the human corpse

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination: not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is seemingly deployed expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between life and death. In his talk, Dr Troyer will explore the relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today.

Dr Troyer will describe the "Happy Death Movement" of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpses and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into "death prevention technologies.”

Dr Troyer will ask you to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways and will argue that the consequences of total control over death and the dead body are not liberation, but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species.