by Amy Hickman.

Body Worlds: The Anatomy of Happiness is an exhibition of plastinated bodies and body parts, alongside text and images that, according to the promotional material, together aim to elucidate “how emotions like happiness physically shape your body and influence your overall health, showing you the powerful connection between mind and body.”[1] Plastination is a process invented in the 1970s by Body Worlds’ creator, Dr Gunther von Hagens, that preserves a dead body—human or animal—by replacing the water and fat contained in it with polymers, leaving a corpse—Body Worlds calls it a “plastinate”—that, unlike those subjected to other preservation methods, retains much of the visual and textural detail of the “fresh” specimen, and can be dissected and elaborately positioned before curing.[2] This process, Thomas S. Hibbs suggests, “lends itself to theatricality”;[3] bodies are posed to display athleticism or drama, or else are split into component parts—organs one way, nerves the other—or frozen and sliced for cross-sectional viewing. There are bodies playing sports, doing gymnastics, playing chess, and, somewhat comically, begging for more time; there are slices and segments of humans suspended from the ceiling; there are floating organs, severed limbs, and cabinets full of brains, lungs, and foetuses. We’re presented with a diverse array of bodies performing spectacular feats—regularly athletic, occasionally intellectual or sexual.[4]
        Dispatch published a review of the current Body Worlds exhibition at the Northbridge Centre some months ago, Riley Landau’s “Corpse-Watching Comes to Perth,” valuable reading for anyone considering visiting this or any future Body Worlds instalments.[5] Landau makes the compelling case that Body Worlds “is an exhibition of voyeurism and violence: a thinly veiled excuse to violate taboos in the name of education” that reduces the unacknowledged human beings whose bodies make up the show to mere anatomy. Landau highlights the horror of what he calls the “sex room” (admittedly, I think Body Worlds called it something a little more dignified) in which two flayed bodies are posed in coitus, one body split open (ouch) to allow a cross-sectional view of penis in vagina. Moreover, though, Landau draws our attention to the murky questions of consent surrounding not just these two specific corpses—in their acquisition, presentation, and photogenicity—but von Hagens’s entire operation. As the show closes, I want to suggest that Landau’s review, as well as the reflections of other critics on Body Worlds and von Hagens’s operations more broadly, invite us to reconsider the educational value of the show—against the claims of Body Worlds itself to its educational significance, to be sure, but perhaps also against the claims of those same critics, i.e., that this purported pedagogical value serves only to justify an exhibition of grotesque pornography and violence, and is, therefore, not really educational at all. In other words, I want to suggest that Body Worlds might, after all, teach us something.
        Thomas S. Hibbs, Catholic philosopher and critic of another, earlier Body Worlds exhibit for the New Atlantis, explicitly describes Body Worlds as pornography, and sets this in clear opposition to any enlightening potential it might bear. [6] Landau is a touch more circumspect, directing our attention to the “inevitable air of the male gaze hovering over a display that exposes the fully denuded body of a female figure,” and to, somewhat obviously, the perversity of the “sex room,” both of which, he notes, make a much stronger appeal to the viewer’s attention than the “buckets of text and activities that barely connect to the actual objects on display” and the “sloppily-written history” that accompanies them. Significantly, he compares Body Worlds to the Paris Morgue, where viewers would gather to gawk at dead sex workers and which, he claims, was similarly “marketed as a place where the public could learn anatomical knowledge” but which “in reality… was a space of entertainment.”[7] For Landau, the claims to pedagogical value of the Paris Morgue and Body Worlds alike are a thin veneer plastered over its opposite: “voyeurism and violence.” Both Hibbs and Landau, that is, see the purported educational value of the show and the fact that it makes a grotesque spectacle of the human body as necessarily contradictory: it’s not educational because it’s obscene, and it’s obscene because it’s not educational. As Hibbs writes:

The exhibit’s little anatomical lessons, even were they not overwhelmed by the indelible images of vivisected bodies, will not take us far toward a rich vocabulary for death. Indeed, what is on display is not the mystery of death, but the reduction of bodies to inert plasticized parts displayed for viewers—in short, a pornography of the dead human body. Body Worlds brings us face to face with something profound, but it will leave us mute and inarticulate, the very image of what we behold.[8]

But what if we took Body Worlds as seriously as these two critics suggest—which is to say, as a piece of pornographic media? Can we not learn from porn? Actually, can we fail to learn from porn?

Hibbs would say yes: 

Merely asserting that one is engaging in the laudatory practice of overcoming taboos about dead bodies does not make it so. One might equally claim that pornography can provide sex education, when what porn in fact does is to reduce sex to the manipulation of body parts stripped of any larger human significance.[9]

But isn’t this exactly what anti-pornography polemicists, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, have always feared? That is, precisely as Hibbs suggests, the danger of pornography is its ability to actually effectuate the reduction of sex to the manipulation of those body parts “stripped of any larger human significance,” among other apparently harmful effects—not just to represent it. As MacKinnon put it in Only Words:

The message of these materials… is “get her,” pointing at all women… The content of this message is not unique to pornography. It is the function of pornography in effectuating it that is unique.[10]

For MacKinnon, Dworkin, and others, porn isn’t (merely) the fantastical representation of women’s subordination, easily separated from life itself, but rather, it is the vector of that subordination; it disseminates and reproduces it. In other words, porn is contagious—or, better, educational.[11] All of this is to say that just because Body Worlds isn’t educational in the way it claims to be—i.e., that just because the weird little didactic panels, with their random (or poetic?) line breaks rambling about how

devoting yourself to a task that seems challenging

and doable at the same time,

be it at work or during your personal time,

will likely boost your self esteem[12]

aren’t exactly a source of enlightenment for your average viewer—doesn’t therefore mean that we aren’t getting educated one way or another. It just might not be in the way that we want.
            Landau certainly isn’t blasé about the reproducibility of the ideas and images that come out of Body Worlds—he just locates its disseminative qualities elsewhere than in the “educational” content of the show. He’s concerned with the ability of viewers to photograph the dead and circulate those photos, which, combined with the irreverence with which the bodies are presented, certainly doesn’t encourage treating them dignity. He writes:

The only room where photography was explicitly banned was the sex room. Even then, attendants stood outside the room—meaning you could simply walk into a corner and take a photo without being seen. No two people, dead or alive, should be photographed in the midst of a sexual act without consent.[13]

Interrogating Body Worlds on the basis of consent isn’t exactly new terrain: von Hagens has faced these questions before, and Body Worlds, unlike other derivative exhibitions, claims that all whole bodies featured in the travelling exhibitions were from donors who provided living consent.[14] Perhaps unsurprisingly, this claim remains unsubstantiated, and von Hagens’s bodies are separated from their paperwork in such a way that made it impossible for a 2006 NPR investigation to confirm;[15] in fact, von Hagens himself insists that irreversible anonymity is an essential condition of a body’s transformation from “mourned corpse” to anatomical specimen.[16] Von Hagens has also more than once agreed to return bodies retrieved from his facilities due to their dubious acquisition, including two found with bullet wounds to the head.[17]
        More interesting, maybe, is Landau’s idea that donors’ consent to plastination doesn’t also confer consent to having one’s dead body photographed, fucking or otherwise, and posted on Instagram. But why is it that one of the few ways we feel properly authorised to criticise this glib spectacle of human remains is to extend the idea of what they should have had to consent to? That is, it’s worth contesting the grounds of this idea, and asking, instead: what if it doesn’t matter whether they consented? That’s not to suggest that it would be fine if they were executed political prisoners. Rather, it’s to ask: regardless of whether the bodies in the “sex room” consented to everything that has happened to them after death, shouldn’t we still be disturbed by their treatment? By the same measure, if we make consent the rule by which bodies should appear or not appear in Body Worlds, we run the risk of producing an interesting problem: that some bodies can be specimens rather than grievable human beings, because they consented to their transformation (the gymnast, the guy begging for more time, the pair in the sex room), while others cannot be specimens and must remain grievable corpses because they didn’t and couldn’t consent—let’s say, the foetuses. I’m not trying to be hysterical here: when I’ve discussed the show with normal, everyday people (say, people who learned who Charlie Kirk was only when he got his head blown off), it’s one of the first things they all asked: how did they get the foetuses? Lauren Berlant recognised the problem: that the things we fight to have recognised as conferring on us the character of meaningful personhood also get borrowed to produce the idea of foetal personhood, as not only a “legal and medical category” but as a “site of cultural fantasy” which ends up, or at least risks, lending the foetus a more strongly human status than other human beings (primarily although not exclusively women).[18] 
        On the other hand, even while it opens up these sorts of tricky questions in the case of Body Worlds and in the production of human specimens more broadly, the primacy of consent also necessarily limits the kinds of ethical encounters we can have with sex and its products. That is, it’s historically significant that we insist on the moral irrelevance of most questions about who we have sex with and how; it’s a vital way that we protect ourselves and our freedom to have sex with who we want without intrusion from, say, the state or the church, and to ensure our own bodily integrity. The problem isn’t consent per se; nonetheless, it is a problem that, as Katherine Angel argues, “consent has a limited purview, and it is being asked to bear too great a burden, to address problems it is not equipped to solve.”[19] That’s why, for example, popular feminism underscores affirmative and enthusiastic consent—because consent alone isn’t enough to guarantee that a choice has been made in freedom rather than under a “dynamic of unequal power.”[20] Consent alone cannot assure us that we are having an ethical encounter with a dead body any more than it can assure us that we are having good sex. Body Worlds may well be ethically indefensible, but that argument cannot live or die in the details of the forms that each donor signed, particularly since we’ll never know who signed what, exactly.
        So what, if anything, can Body Worlds teach us? The short answer is: you’ve gotta dance like nobody’s watching. Far from helping us glimpse the mystery of death, Body Worlds demands that we see ourselves as willing participants in the maximisation of life. Body Worlds offers a vision of enthusiastically consensual subordination—yes, I will dance like nobody’s watching, yes I will eat my vegetables and find thirty, yes I will quit smoking—yes I will eat the bugs yes I will get in the pod. Above all, it demands that we say yes to life: to life at its most base and most material, life above all else. That’s the truth of how it reduces us to “body parts stripped of any larger human significance”—not that it devalues humans in death, but that it reduces us to mere life. We can say yes to it, if we want. But as Foucault put it: “we must not think that by saying yes” (“to sex,” but also, I’m arguing, to everything else), “one says no to power.”[21]



Body Worlds: The Anatomy of Happiness, Northbridge Centre, 7 November 2025 – 1 March 2026.

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Footnotes:

1. https://bodyworlds.com.au/perth/

2. https://bodyworlds.com/about/plastination-technique/

3. Thomas S. Hibbs, “Dead Body Porn: The Grotesqueries of the ‘Body World’ Exhibit,” The New Atlantis 15 (2007): 129, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/dead-body-porn.

4. Comparatively, it’s hard not to notice how little embodied work has gone into the marketing—it’s “Authentic. Educational. Inspiring.” and its highlights are presented as a cutesily emoji-bulleted list.

5. Riley Landau, “Corpse-Watching Comes to Perth,” Dispatch, November 24, 2025, https://dispatchreview.info/Corpse-Watching-Comes-to-Perth-by-Riley-Landau. 

6. Hibbs, “Dead Body Porn,” 131.

7. Landau, “Corpse-Watching.”

8. Hibbs, “Dead Body Porn,” 131.

9. Hibbs, “Dead Body Porn,” 131.

10. Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1996 [1993]), 21–22.

11. If this seems overly hysterical now, in the era of ubiquitous internet pornography, it’s possible to recognise that Dworkin, MacKinnon, and others were absolutely prescient about pornography’s educational power without also necessarily fearing it in the same way they do or insisting on seeing it banned. See, for example, Amia Srinivasan’s “Talking to My Students About Porn”: “Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear these protests? Yes, they said… ‘But if it weren’t for pornography,’ one woman said, ‘how would we ever learn to have sex?’… The psyches of my students are products of pornography. In them, the warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realised: sex for my students is what porn says it is.” In The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury, 2021), 40–41.

12. Body Worlds exhibition; this panel was attached to the figure titled “Chess Player,” posed and dissected to reveal its nervous system and brain.

13. Landau, “Corpse-Watching.” For what it’s worth, I didn’t see any attendants anywhere near the sex room.

14. Neda Ulaby, “Origins of Exhibited Cadavers Questioned,” NPR, August 11, 2006, https://www.npr.org/2006/08/11/5637687/origins-of-exhibited-cadavers-questioned.

15. Ulaby, “Origins of Exhibited Cadavers Questioned.”

16. Gunther von Hagens, “No Skeletons in the Closet—Facts, Background and Conclusions,” November 17, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20090327110115/http://www.bodyworlds.com/Downloads/E_Kirgisien%20AW%20GVH%202.pdf. It can be hardly claimed, therefore, that Body Worlds merely represents or encourages the objectification of the dead; it is the objectification of the dead.

17. “Holes in Heads Suggest Executed Among Anatomist’s Collection,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 24, 2004, https://www.smh.com.au/world/holes-in-heads-suggest-executed-among-anatomists-collection-20040124-gdi7w7.html.

18. “By merging the American counterdiscourse of minority rights with the revitalized providential nationalist rhetoric of the Reaganite right, the pro-life movement has composed a magical and horrifying spectacle of amazing vulnerability: the unprotected person, the citizen without a country or a future, the fetus unjustly imprisoned in its mother’s hostile gulag.” Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997), 97.

19. Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (Verso, 2022), 27.

20. Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, 31.

21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Vintage, 1990 [1976]), 157.

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Images: Body Worlds: The Anatomy of Happiness. Credit: Supplied.