On Body Snatching: How the Rhetoric of Globalization Elides Cultural Difference in ‘Bodies… The Exhibition’
[Article]
/ Raymond I. Schuck
; Ellen W. Gorsevski & Canchu Lin
7731-1474
Rhetorical practices warrant analysis amid contemporary globalization, as discourses frame international museum and science-styled exhibit display practices by drawing attention toward idealized human global unity and away from concern for respecting differences between westerners and Chinese persons. Among such international practices, recent displays of deceased human bodies, cleaned and entertainingly posed, have appeared in museums and other exhibition centers in major cities around the world. These displays have given rise to significant ethical questions regarding the use of undocumented Chinese bodies. In this analysis of ‘Bodies. . . The Exhibition’, which has been central to those ethical questions, we examine how rhetorical strategies of realist discourse and identification through commonality invoke a rhetoric of globalization that reinforces western international privilege by situating plasticized Chinese bodies within truth claims about human similarity that eschew intercultural understandings and issues of intercultural respect.