From October 2005 through April of 2006, The Franklin Institute hosted Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. During its seven month run over 603,000 visitors attended the exhibition, making it the most well attended traveling museum exhibit in the history of Philadelphia. Before bringing the exhibition to The Franklin […]
Issue 79
Emilie Passow: Our Bodies, Our Selves
Our Bodies, Our Selves, asserts the title of a prominent guide to women’s health, unequivocally making clear the position of the authors, the Boston’s Women’s Health Collective, on the ancient, ongoing enigma of the mind -body connection: our bodies are our identities. Historically, responses to this intriguing question have ranged from a primarily religious conception […]
Stacey Ake: Anatomical Gothic: I Sing the Body Electric
The body is important. And yet, the body dies. It seems such an obvious thing, death, and yet we live in a society that has somehow shunned death, as if it were some misbehaving Amish, which, by our disapproval, will somehow fall into line with our desires. But what are our desires? Do we even […]
Geoff Wyss: Profession of the Body
I am watching a fat kid eat. A girl, this time. With none of the daintiness heavy girls sometimes affect at meals, she stokes fry after fry into the glowing scuttle of her mouth, building steam against the last three periods of the day. When she giggles through her nose at something a friend has […]
Debra Liese: Bread
I gave myself a fake black eye a few years ago. It wasn’t meant to be a big deal. It happened the way you might, in some reverie, find yourself signing another person’s name over and over in loopy, liquid cursive. I was in boarding school. At that time, I hadn’t hung photographs of myself […]
Jacqueline Kolosov: Inked Into Skin
Though he could not see the blue lines without the help of a mirror, just knowing they were there carried him back to the intricate maps that once adorned his grandfather’s mahogany-walled study, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the main harbor in the Port-of-Spain. How proud his grandfather had been of their family’s history. Only later […]