Interspecies Blendings and Resurrections: Material Histories of Disability and Race in Taxidermy Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract

 
 
 This paper analyzes the contemporary art practice of rogue taxidermy. Specifically, I look at the rogue taxidermy of Sarina Brewer, an artist who utilizes sensationalist aesthetics and representations found in historical sideshows alongside unconventional forms of taxidermy to critique historical and contemporary forms of body display. I discuss the material histories that informed and shaped the practice of taxidermy and how taxidermy was (and continues to be) bound up with a complex history of human and nonhuman animal exploitation. I analyze the interconnections between nonhuman animal taxidermy display and the historical preservation, study, and exhibition of postmortem human bodies in museums. The ethical implications of using nonhuman animal bodies as objects for political art entangle rogue taxidermy artists within the domination of nonhuman animals (alive and dead). The act of using postmortem nonhuman animal materials in artistic sculpture makes rogue taxidermy artists complicit in the history of modernity that used various bodies to outline “undesirable” racial and physiological variances. Furthermore, I analyze the subversive potential of Brewer’s sculptures to differently reconstruct sculptures of lusus naturae – from past representations – but, also, address the risky complexity of staging “monstrosity” in contemporary rogue taxidermy art. I conclude that the access and permission to place nonhuman animal bodies on display – from the outset – shows a normalization of human domination over nonhuman animal bodies, but argue that Sarina Brewer’s art, in various instances, critiques exploitation through multiple forms of body display.
 
 
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".