Corporeal Legibility

While driving to RCC this morning, I heard a segment on NPR about the Visible Proofs exhibit in Washington. As you all know, I am obsessed with the intersection of medical exams and literature, so find this new exhibit fascinating not so much because I am invested in criminality, but because I am invested in the languages bodies speak. Michael Sappol (author of Traffic of Dead Bodies) is involved in the exhibit. Projects that grapple with these corporeal languages allow the kind of interdisciplinary work I'd like to do: anthropology, critical theory, biology, criminology, cultural studies, new media studies, etc. Such a dialectical space allows us to consider how criminology is inexorably linked to political and social issues of race, gender, sexuality, etc. and calls into question at the same time it reifies the foundations of "pure" science as it relates to these categories. Note specifically, under "Artifacts," the Bertillon Cards and consider what categories were used to catalog criminals? To what end? This kind of exhibit reveals a history that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.