Germaine Greer slices Gunther Von Hagens

by Sylvano Lucchetti - 2008-02-26 20:46:51

Would Germaine Greer be more likely to eat a dead body?

Greer writes that she is "having to confront" her own prudery in her Guardian article Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds is strictly showbiz. She injects religious argument and examples of proper corpse handling techniques into her lifeless 'art&architecture' blog entry, to cleverly reveal the intricate workings of her mind.

Her excoriation of Gunther Von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition as just a "lineal descendent of the freak show and the wax works," and her dressing down of the man because of his choice of black fedora effectively demonstrate her ignorance of science and the challenges of marketing science in a time where has-been public intellectuals create news by entering and failing to survive a Big Brother challenge.

That the bodies are from people who gave permission for the corpses to be used by Gunther is subtly put in doubt by Greer who prefaces this fact with "apparently." "The show is presented as educational," she sneers. His creations are "part of a continuum in which the body becomes a medium like any other. It is no longer sacred; no longer their reducible nugget of identity," she claims.

But it is her confrontation with her own prudery that is at issue here.

And the prude wins out. Greer's attack on these "blasphemous" and "grisly" works helps to justify her rejection of wonder, her surrender to the mystical and her assimilation into the middle class.

All this from a woman who encouraged women to "taste their own menstrual blood." The Female Eunuch, indeed.