Illustrated Lecture by Margaret Schwartz, Fordham University
Date: Tuesday, August 19th 
Time: 8pm 
Admission: $8 (Tickets here)

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” wrote Wittgenstein, and nowhere is this more poignantly true than in the case of embalming. Embalmed corpses represent the deceased in the medium of their own bodies. This “last look” can be as simple as arranging the limbs and closing the eyes, or it can be an elaborate tableau achieved only through advanced embalming technology and constant upkeep. One such “still life in death” is the corpse of Eva Peron, better known as Evita, which was embalmed for permanent display in 1952. Unlike Lenin, however, whose body is still displayed, political conditions in Argentina were volatile, and Evita’s corpse was swept up in the struggle to define social class, gender, and politics. Stolen, hidden, buried in secret and then exhumed, the corpse was for twentieth century Argentina a literal emblem of the body of the nation as it underwent convulsive and painful change.

This talk will tell the corpse’s shocking story from the necrophiliac embalmer to the dipsomaniacal colonel who, when plied with drink and pressed about the corpse’s whereabouts, allegedly screamed, “I buried her standing because she had balls!” In the process, this fantastic tale will help elaborate the complex relationship between the visual image and embodiment in our contemporary practices of death, mourning, and in the end, meaning-making. Schwartz will argue that as we exile the dead ever more from our increasingly image saturated world, we lose the ability to grieve and with it the possibility of learning from the past.

Margaret Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her book An Iconography of the Flesh: How Corpses Mean As Matter (from which this talk is excerpted) is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2015.