Représentations populaires et biomédicales de l'intérieur du corps

Inside/Insight: Popular and biomedical representations and the aesthetics of the inner body


Call for papers

Düsseldorf, 6-8 April 2027

Organisers: Michaela Clark (Düsseldorf); Heiner Fangerau (Düsseldorf); Arno Görgen (Bern); Stefan Höltgen (Bonn)

Since the twentieth century, understandings of the human body have increasingly shifted from seeing it as a stable organic object to a malleable entity produced by socio-political conditions, popular beliefs, and technological intervention. In particular, the body’s interior – long concealed from direct observation – serves as a site of cultural imagination and biopolitical negotiation mediated through photography, film, medical imaging technologies, and digital forms of visualisation and simulation. Across scientific and popular media alike, representations of the inner body shape understandings of corporeality, health and illness, as well as both individual and social identity.

The conference Inside/Insight explores the body’s interior as a culturally charged and imaginative space in which questions of visibility and invisibility, knowledge and evidence, affect and aesthetics, and power and body politics converge. Photographic practices, medical teaching films, and documentaries establish distinctive visual regimes that produce scientific authority while shaping pedagogical engagement and eliciting affective experiences. However, such imagery also forms a significant part of popular culture: horror in film and video games radically expose the inner body, transforming biomedical visuality into grotesque and even monstrous sights. These media practices negotiate cultural fears, desires, and concepts of bodily boundaries while challenging distinctions between the normal and the pathological. Both scientific and popular depictions of corporeal space are thus infused with body politics and biopolitics. In its imagining, the anatomised body emerges as a space that can be regulated, optimised, and normalised, revealing broader structures of power. Questions of gender and sexuality are equally central: biomedical and popular cultural representations can reproduce and reinforce or deconstruct and destabilize bodily norms.

The conference focuses on the diverse media forms and representational practices through which internal bodily spaces are made visible and thereby rendered open to intervention. We are interested both in the ways the interior spaces of the body are produced as an object of scientific knowledge and in its staging as a site onto which cultural anxieties, desires and hopes are projected and negotiated. It seeks to further examine technologies of visualisation and simulation that do not merely represent the body’s interior but actively produce it through performative media practices. These include digital media and gaming formats that translate complex physiological processes into interactive models for education, training, and public engagement.

By bringing together these heterogeneous media practices, the conference addresses current debates in media studies, game studies, and the medical humanities. It asks how imaginaries of the human body have developed historically, how they operate aesthetically, and what epistemic status they occupy at the intersection of science, art, and popular culture.

We look forward to contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners working across the humanities, social sciences, medicine, media studies, visual culture, and the arts. The conference is designed to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue across fields. Theoretical, historical, empirical, artistic and practice-based approaches, as well as case studies, performance, and comparative perspectives are welcome.

Possible genres, media, and topics include (but are not limited to):

· Visualisations of the body’s interior in medicine and the human sciences

· Medical aesthetics and the clinical gaze

· Photography, film, comics, and video

· Body horror, horror cinema, and splatter film

· Documentary and mockumentary

· Science fiction and fantasy

· Pornography and eroticism

· True Crime and crime film

· Video games and serious games

· Sound and sonic representations of the body’s interior

· Memes and digital popular culture

· Fine art, installation art, performance art

· Gender, sexuality, and the male gaze

· Disgust, affect, and emotion

· Violence

· Ethics and aesthetics

· (Eco-)feminist perspectives

· Biopsychosocial perspectives on the body

· Lookmaxxing and bodily optimisation

· Biopolitics, body politics, and technologies of the body

· Visualisation, simulation, and digital body models
 

 

Presentation format

· 20-minute presentations

· Papers may be presented in English or German

Please submit the following as a PDF of MS Word (.doc/.docx) file here by 1 November 2026:

· an abstract (maximum 350 words)

· a short academic CV

· the abstract and short CV together should not exceed one page.

For questions feel free to reach out to michaela.clark@med.uni-duesseldorf.de.

We look forward to welcoming you to Düsseldorf!