Drawing Blood Podcast
Drawing Blood – Season 3
Episode 1 – Dental Phantoms, Tooth Horror, and Medical Simulation
Emma and Christy look at dental phantoms — terrifying but ubiquitous tools in dental education since the nineteenth century that feature humanoid heads made out of metal or wood, and a gaping mouth full of teeth. With these objects as our starting point, we talk about why dentists and dentistry are so scary, collectors of vintage medical devices, mouth erotics, the history of simulation and ‘machines’ in medical education, ghosts of the face and the word ‘phantom’, faciality and animality, face transplants and facelessness, dental horror (particularly Little Shop of Horrors) and fetish, and teeth as ‘luxury bones.’
Episode 2 – Cannibalism on Film, Empathy, and Eating Disorders
Emma and Christy look at Julia Ducournau’s first feature film, the cannibal coming-of-age body horror flick Grave (or Raw), 2016. In this episode, we cover cinéma du corps and New French Extremity, empathy and monstrosity, the horrors of being a girl, the horrors of being in a body, eating disorders, veterinary science, ‘being meat’ and becoming animal, vegan cinema, self control, desire, and what it means to be a moral cannibal — and a moral subject.
Episode 3 – Alchemy, Androgyny, and the Paintings of Remedios Varo
In this episode, Emma and Christy look at the complex paintings of the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). During our conversation, we discuss female alchemists, artist’s studio-as-laboratory, science and occultism, the overlapping practices of spiritual and material transformation, Carl Jung and esotericism in psychoanalysis, the Fourth Dimension, ‘objective art’, and alchemical androgyny.
Episode 4 – Tattoos, “Deviant” Signs, and Surveilled Skins
Emma and Christy present a brief history of tattooing in Europe. We talk tattoos as art history; sailors and soldiers; the archival (in)visibility of tattoos; the ‘Cook myth’, colonial contact, and contagion; syphilitic tattoos and pathologisation; working class bodies; tattoos and material culture; criminal anthropology; pain; the skin ego; danger and deviance; the limits of interpretation and (il)legibility of signs; ‘fugitive’ images; pilgrim tattoos; and art histories from below.
Episode 5 – David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future,’ Surgery, and Performance Art
Emma and Christy watch David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, exploring the themes of this work while also connecting to some of the director’s earlier movies. In this episode, we discuss the fears and the pleasures of the human body and cutting into it; surgery as sex; Cronenbergian body horror; the monstrous as art; being and becoming cyborgs; evolution and pain; technology as prosthesis; the posthuman; contemporary performance art (good and bad); the cosmetic gaze; the body as text; and meaning making.
Episode 6 – Seeing Voices, Margaret Watts Hughes, and the Science of the Invisible
Emma and Christy discover Margaret Watts Hughes’s beautiful ‘voice figures’, a series of images made through the direct action of her voice between 1885 and 1904. In this episode, we discuss the earliest sound recordings, scientific ‘instruments’ (it’s a pun), cat pianos, severed ears, occult science, seaweed scrapbooks, women in STEM, logos and the word of God, visualizing the invisible, the Little Mermaid, clairvoyant research, ‘thought forms’ and the death agonies of pigeons, science and feeling, and why sonic media is always already haunted.
Episode 1 – The Sims 4 Paranormal, Video Games and Belief, and Alternate Worlds
Emma and Christy play The Sims 4 Paranormal ‘Stuff Pack’, exploring the game’s haunted house and séance aesthetics. We talk Victorian occult imaginaries, playing Sims as an emotional outlet, the promise of perfect capitalism, video games and affect, queer computer spaces, technopagans and cyber covens, and esoteric beliefs on the internet.
Episode 2 – Dollhouses of Death, Forensic Science, and Close Looking
Emma and Christy look at Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (c. 1940s) AKA dollhouses of death. We talk Victorian children and dollplay; the origins of legal medicine; CSI as visual analysis; Barbies and buzzcuts; girlbossing on the police force; busybodies, gender, and the history of policing; class voyeurism; contemporary art and crime scene photography; Sherlock Holmes; and the afterlives of evidence.
Episode 3 – Disability, Bad Horror, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old
Emma and Christy discuss M. Night Shyamalan’s 2021 film Old. We talk about what makes good (and bad) horror; harmful representations of disability in movies, art, and society; aging and chronic illness; the history of medical experimentation; critical disability studies; and “crip time”. We may not recommend actually watching this film, but we definitely recommend thinking through some of what’s going on in it!
Episode 4 – Vegetal Agents, Plant-Human Entanglements, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography
Emma and Christy look at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph ‘Maud’ (c. 1874) and discuss plant consciousness, agency, and erotics. In this episode, we cover tendrils and tentacles, Victorian queerness, plant horror, early ecologies, Darwin and plant sex, interspecies entanglements, photography and desire, colonial collecting, tipitiwitchets, sadomasochism, and whether your houseplant can kill you.
Episode 5 – Morphine Addiction, Decadence and Degeneration, and Fin-de-Siecle
Emma and Christy use Eugène Grasset’s lithograph Morphinomaniac (1897) as a starting point to talk about artistic depictions of morphine and historical opioid addiction, as well as decadence and degeneration in fin-de-siècle Parisian society. In this episode, we cover vampires, hypodermic syringes, Orientalism and Japonisme, ‘dangerous’ women, masturbation, pleasure, and sex work, true crime waxworks, and the gendered consumption of women, goods, and drugs.
Episode 6 – Atheist Relics, Couples’ Cremation, and Victorian ‘Infidels’
Emma and Christy look at Alfred Gilbert’s sculpture Mors Janua Vitae (c. 1905–1907) at the Royal College of Surgeons, London — a life-sized bronze which houses the remains of the couple Edward and Eliza Macgloghlin. We talk relics and transi tombs; Victorian atheism and the history of unbelief; cremation, miasma, and lead-lined coffins; books bound in human skin; Victorian sex (and free love!); affairs between artists and patrons; Welsh druids; paganism; birth control and the throuple; infidel feminism; and abolishing the family.
Minisode 1 – Women and Early Modern Mines with Dr. Gabriele Marcon
Surprise — it’s a minisode! In our very first interview, historian of early modern mining Dr Gabriele Marcon (I Tatti / Harvard University) shows Emma and Christy a painting from early modern Spanish America. Join us as we learn about the erotics of mining, the power of menstrual blood, early modern medicine, female alchemists, the long history of women’s invisible labour, elixirs of life, midwifery, and (somehow) Mount Rushmore.
Episode 1 – Severed Breasts, Lee Miller, and Surrealist Photography
Emma and Christy look at Lee Miller’s photographs Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting I and II (c. 1929) and talk about double mastectomies, fragmented bodies, feminist(?) art, Georges Bataille… and recipes for ‘cauliflower breasts’.
Episode 2 – Ectoplasmic Touch, Margery Crandon, and Science in the Séance Room
Emma and Christy look at archival photographs from the séances of Mina ‘Margery’ Crandon (around 1925) and talk slimy protrusions, sex, scientific photography, the testing of mediums, and the science of spiritualism.
Episode 3 – Andy Warhol’s Noses, Capitalism & Race, and the Art of Plastic Surgery
Emma and Christy discuss surgical and cultural ideas embedded in Andy Warhol’s series of Before and After paintings (1961/62) of a nose job. In this episode we talk plastic surgery and big egos, the before-and-after image trope, racial typification, criminology, connoisseurship, and American consumerism and capitalism.
Episode 4 – Nationalism, Folk Horror, and the Ecopolitics of ‘Midsommar’
Emma and Christy look at Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar and talk environmentalism, nationalism, community, grief, horror (obviously), folk art, facial transplants, whiteness, screaming, and IKEA.
Episode 5 – Cosmas and Damian, The Miracle of the Black Leg, and Transplant Histories
In this episode, Emma and Christy explore the story of surgeon-saints Cosmas and Damian through paintings of the ‘miracle of the black leg’ from c. 1370-1495 in Italy and Spain. These pictures bring up complicated ideas around visibility and race, surgery, and historiography. In this episode, we talk Blackness in early modern Europe, organ donation and race, the long history of systemic racism in the medical system, surgeon-historians, and looking at the past from a modern perspective.
Episode 6 – Human Remains in Museum Collections, Care, and Contemporary Art
Emma and Christy look at the ethics, politics, and practice of displaying human remains — from museum collections of mummies to photographs of dead bodies. We talk bog bodies, the rights of the dead, dry vs. ‘wet’ specimens, Free Renty, consent, repatriation, museums’ imperial histories, burdens of care, and how recent art — from Andres Serrano to Gala Porras-Kim — might exacerbate or enact solutions to these issues.