UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Organ Ensembles: Medicalization, Modernity, and Horror in 19th and 20th Century Narratives of the Body in its Parts A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Yeesheen Yang Committee in charge: Professor Larissa Heinrich, Co-Chair Professor Yingjin Zhang, Co-Chair Professor Michael Davidson Professor Lisa Lowe Professor Natalia Molina 2012 Copyright Yeesheen Yang, 2012 All rights reserved The Dissertation of Yeesheen Yang is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Co-Chair Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page. iii Table of Contents. vi List of Figures. v Acknowledgements. vi Vita. viii Abstract. x Introduction. 1 Chapter 1: Sites of Haunting. 13 Chapter 2: The Blood is the Life. 53 Chapter 3: The Future Perfect . 101 Chapter 4: Liminal States . 151 Conclusion. 179 Bibliography. 185 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Eadweard Muybridge, "Cockatoo, Bird in Flight,” 1883-6. 72 Figure 2: Etienne-Jules Marey, “The Flight of Birds,” October 1969. 73 Figure 3: Etienne-Jules Marey, "Joinville soldier walking, 1883”. 78 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful for the mentorship and the personal kindness extended to me by every member of my dissertation committee. Lisa Lowe and Michael Davidson I thank both for inspiring my interest in literary and cultural studies in the first place with their remarkable undergraduate teaching, and for their continued support in the research and writing of this project. Yingjin Zhang has always provided clear guidance and unerring advice in helping me to me to narrow and pursue my research interests. I thank him and Natalia Molina for their generous feedback on my work. I also appreciate Yingjin’s guidance in the other aspect of graduate work: teaching. I am indebted to Darrin McGraw for his ongoing mentorship in the art of teaching language, and for his professional support and guidance. I am grateful to Don Wayne, Dennis Childs, Alain Cohen and Catherine Ploye for their help along the way. I especially thank Larissa Heinrich for her constant support. Her unflagging willingness to encourage me in my exploration of new ideas and also to provide a friendly ear in difficult times has been invaluable. I could not have gotten this dissertation to its current stage without Larissa and Michael’s thoughtful offers to read work that was sometimes in woeful states of disorganization and incompleteness. This project was written with the generous support of the University of California Humanities Graduate Research Fellowship and the UCSD Literature Department Dissertation Fellowship, without which the completion of this work within this particular vi timeline, and the breadth of exploratory research that went into this project, would not have been possible. I am also appreciative of the support extended by my colleagues. Ana Grinberg provided wonderful opportunities for conversations on monstrosity and movies, and introduced me to the story of “The Good Lady Ducayne” which later came to feature prominently in one of the chapters. It would be difficult to imagine graduate school without the camaraderie of Lisa Vernoy, Alvin Wong, Stevie Ruiz, Inhye Han, Laura Pecenco, and Laura Hoeger, among others. I also thank Jason Ponce and particularly Laura Hoeger for working with me in the many stages of writing dissertation; their “in the trenches” support – both editorial and otherwise – is truly valued. My family – Ming-I Chen, Justin Yang, and Yusheen Yang – have been incredibly understanding about the constraints that my odd writing schedules and the various demands of graduate school have placed on them. Finally, my deepest gratitude I extend to Brian Lindseth. It is difficult to know the extent to which this project was made possible by his generosity as a person and as a fellow scholar; the endless daily conversations, advice on writing, sharing of new ideas and theory, and moral support are as much a part of this project as anything else. vii VITA EDUCATION: 2012 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) La Jolla, CA Ph.D., Department of Literature (Cultural Studies) Dissertation title: Organ Ensembles: Medicalization, Modernity, and Horror in 19th and 20th Century Narratives of the Body in its Parts. Advisors: Professors Larissa Heinrich and Yingjin Zhang Completed August 24, 2012. Conferred December 15, 2012. 2010 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) La Jolla, CA M.A., Department of Literature (Cultural Studies) 2005 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) La Jolla, CA B.A., Department of Literature B.S., Department of Biology TEACHING: 2011 Instructor of Record. UCSD Department of Literature. The Mall and American Life. Upper division lecture course. 2007- Teaching Assistant. UCSD Culture, Art and Technology Program. 2010 Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication – K. Lorraine Graham. Senior-level Writing Practicum – Dr. Mark Hineline. Controlling Life – Dr. Cathy Gere. Laws of Wo/Man and Laws of Nature – Dr. Tal Golan. A History of Time: Work Time and Railway Time – Dr. Stefan Tanaka. Natural Disasters and Human Cultures – Dr. Linday Strauss. Becoming Net Generation – Dr. Peter John. Cultures as Solutions and as Problems – Dr. Ad Muniz. PUBLICATIONS: 2012 “The Blood is the Life: Transfusion, Vampirism, and the Victorian Body in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Under review by Victorian Studies. 2012 “Sites of Haunting: Bodies and Borders in Transplant Narratives.” Under review by Literature and Medicine. viii FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS: 2012 Dissertation Fellowship, UCSD Literature Program 2011 UC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Research Fellowship, UCSD 2011 Graduate Student Summer Teaching Fellowship, UCSD 2006 UC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Research Fellowship, UCSD CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS: 2012 “‘That’s a Hell of a Way to Talk about My New Wife’: the Figure of Frankenstein in Spare Parts Surgery.” Technology and the Body Panel. Cultural Studies Association. March 31, 2012. 2011 “Sites of Haunting: Bodies and Borders in Transplant Narratives.” Invited Talk. Eternal Return of the Body Panel.University of California Society of Fellows in the Humanities. April 29, 2011. 2010 “Seeing is Believing: Transplant Narratives, Disability, and the Transnational Eye.” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association. October 25, 2010. 2010 “Doppelgangers and Uncanny Intimacies in the Global Organ Market.” Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Conference at the University of Minnesota. October 12, 2012. SERVICE: 2011 Co-founder. “Catalyst” Writing Group, UCSD. 2010 Panelist. Graduate Student Quarterly Colloquium Series, UCSD. CURRENT PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS: Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Modern Language Association (MLA) ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Organ Ensembles: Medicalization, Modernity and Horror in 19th and 20th Century Narratives of the Body in its Parts by Yeesheen Yang Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2012 Professor Larissa Heinrich, Co-Chair Professor Yingjin Zhang, Co-Chair The cultural anxieties that imagine life-saving transplant technologies as a source of horror in the 21st century prompt my investigation in this project into the tensions between, roughly, the medical imagination of the body and the cultural imagination of the body of transplant medicine. Insofar as the notion of a body made up of interchangeable x parts that can be broken up, worked, put into circulation, sold, it is constructed as a figure of horror and pathos. This same body, however, can also be healed, made whole, and opened up to new social, political, and physical possibilities. The tensions between the notion of the transplant body as a whole or in parts, as an object of horror or redemption, as a biological object or a site of cultural meaning is a part of what this dissertation concerns itself with. In exploring these questions, this dissertation seeks to expand the discourse from the body seen as a medicalized, instrumentalized object that is alienated (the idea that an organ is simply an organ) to one that is the site of conflicting, evolving, and shifting meanings. This project performs a cultural history of the present, tracing cultural representations of the transplant body in key moments of its technological emergence, in order to assert that the body is a cultural object as well as a medical/technical one, and explore the ways in which these systems of meaning overlap and inform each other. xi Introduction At the dawn of the 21st century, our bodies are caught in a web of concerns about health. Environmental pollutants, genetic markers for disease, and the pursuit and commercialization of longevity into old age - we are surrounded by a maze of threats and hopes that opens our lives to a medicalizing gaze. With the flourishing of biotechnologies our bodies are represented in this age as plastic, subject to fine mechanisms of control (genetic, dietary, pharmaceutical, surgical), and imbued with a new sense of biological possibility. Furthermore, this medical discourse constructs our health in terms of what Nikolas Rose calls the "regime of the self." We are encouraged to do as one genetic screening company urges in its slogan and know ourselves (by purchasing one of their sequencing services, of course). The modern biocitizen from the late-20th century on is meant to understand herself as an active agent with a bioethical responsibility