Queering the Anatomical Theatre
Why call it a theatre? Queer Anatomy Theater looks back to the anatomical theatres of early modern medicine, where dissections took place at a central table surrounded by spectators. The project brings this model of teaching and watching into the present. Instead of placing a passive body at the centre of medical observation, participants handle, wear, interpret and remake anatomical knowledge themselves. The work connects the history of the anatomical theatre with today’s anatomy education, asking how ideas of sex, gender and the body are taught—and how queer participants might learn them differently.
Four Participatory Lessons
This reimagined anatomy classroom unfolds through four participatory lessons. Lesson One uses a CAPTCHA-style game to compare homologous structures in embryonic sex development and question binary teaching models. Lesson Two turns gender-affirming surgery into a collaborative garment-based exercise. Lesson Three uses a photo booth to map encounters between flesh and sex toys, producing a ‘Pleasure Counterfoil’. Lesson Four combines clay modelling and augmented-reality filters to create short videos where human sexuality, microorganisms and interspecies relations meet.
Reality Show
At Dutch Design Week, the project is presented as a work-in-progress: four interactive installations offer a first spatial and participatory test of a larger theatrical format still under development. In its future full-scale form, medical students and healthcare professionals will become the primary participants in a fictional anatomy school, revisiting subjects they once encountered through conventional medical education. Alongside the four lessons, interviews will invite them to reflect on the relationship between their earlier classroom experiences and their participation in the new queer anatomy lessons. The general public will form a second layer of spectatorship, following these encounters through a reality-show-style social media broadcast. In this way, the project links the historical anatomical theatre, today’s anatomy lesson and the reality show, shifting who teaches, who is observed and who gets to interpret the body.
