Masculinity and Embodiment in Reed Bontecou's Civil War Medical Photography

Young in "Masculinity and Embodiment in Reed Bontecou’s Civil War Medical Photography" analyzes masculine embodiment in the extraordinary Civil War medical photographs of Dr. Bontecou, with a focus on the photograph A... [ view full abstract ]

Young in "Masculinity and Embodiment in Reed Bontecou’s Civil War Medical Photography" analyzes masculine embodiment in the extraordinary Civil War medical photographs of Dr. Bontecou, with a focus on the photograph A Morning’s Work. Taken by a surgeon, these photographs customarily feature a male soldier, injury clearly visible, gazing directly at the camera; they situate male bodies in a homosocial—at times, affirmatively homoerotic—circuitry of gazes among patient, photographer, doctor, and viewer. The portraits function as prostheses for multiple forms of reconstruction, whether of the injured male body fitted with artificial limbs or the nation reunifying from war. However, the photograph A Morning’s Work, which depicts only a pile of surgically amputated feet and legs, radically challenges these prosthetic narratives. Young will show how its unmanned limbs invert norms of male embodiment and national Reconstruction; at the same time, she will suggest, it reveals the political—particularly racial —limits of even a radically destabilized image of Civil War white masculinity. Both radical and conservative, the unmanned feet of Bontecou’s photograph function as cultural “phantom limbs” and suggest the complex relations among masculinity, embodiment, and photography in this era.