Performing dissections: feminist performance as research methodology in the medical humanities.

Abstract

Over the past two years, I have been making a performance about human dissection, capitalising on my position as a performance researcher embedded in the medical school at King's College London. The performance seeks to capture and convey the affective culture of the dissection room and the uncanny materiality of the preserved and anatomised bodies within it, dwelling on the emotional, ethical and existential anxiety, the awe, wonder and morbid fascination they elicit. In this article, I demonstrate how the practice of feminist performance might be employed as a research methodology within medical education, and how it might challenge binary assumptions about how future doctors construct their professional identity, by deconstructing the bodies of deceased donors.