Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Transmitting Chinese Medicine: Changing Perceptions of Body, Pathology, and Treatment in Late Imperial China

Historians of Chinese medicine acknowledge the plurality of Chinese medicine along both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Yet, there remains a tendency to think of tradition as being defined by some unchanging features. The Chinese medical body is a case in point. This is assumed to have been formalised by the late Han dynasty around a system of internal organs, conduits, collaterals, and associated body structures. Although criticism was voiced from time to time, this body and the micro/ macrocosmic cosmological resonances that underpin it are seen to persist until the present day. I challenge this view by attending to attempts by physicians in China and Japan in the period from the mid 16th to the late 18th century to reimagine this body. Working within the domain of cold damage therapeutics and combining philological scholarship, empirical observations, and new hermeneutic strategies these physicians worked their way towards a new territorial understanding of the body and of medicine as warfare that required an intimate familiarity with the body’s topography. In late imperial China this new view of the body and medicine was gradually re-absorbed into the mainstream. In Japan, however, it led to a break with this orthodoxy that in the Republican era became influential in China once more. I argue that attending further to the innovations of this period—commonly portrayed as one of decline—from a transnational perspective may help to go beyond the modern insistence to frame East Asian medicines as traditional.