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Transcript

While Hans Bellmer's series of doll creations do not involve elements of food that Foershner's reading highlights, it demonstrates many important ideas of disgust. In the reading, Foershner discusses McCarthy's Bossy Burger, a mockery of cooking shows where the performer deconstructs the food back into its "primal substance", and both the cook and the food appears deconstructed (pg 96). Similar to this concept, Bellmer's dolls, like the one depicted, appears that it could be a normal mannequin, but is in complete disarray. It looks like a human body broken apart and messily thrown back together, and this deconstruction prompts disgust. Like Katie talked about in her presentation, such disarray is uncomfortable, and something our bodies naturally reject.

To further expand on the doll's condition and why this causes disgust, we can connect to Foerschner's other point, that such art that causes disgust force viewers to confront boundaries of life and death, causing awareness of our own existence and body's fragility (101). The doll in the photograph looks injured and broken, as if someone purposely ripped its limbs apart and this prompts empathy from the viewer to imagine how their own body would feel, and force them to consider their own body's fragility. Such graphic demonstrations and images work to bring the uncomfortable, physical feelings to the viewers themselves, triggering disgust. Furthermore, the doll's body parts being so misarranged, and holding an almost-human, uncanny-valley like appearance triggers our amygdala as something unnatural going through an unordinary experience. Therefore we perceive it as a threat. Witnessing something so horrifying in real life is unnatural, unexpected, and not accepted in society, which lets off a signal in our brains to fear it or be repulsed by it.

Barolsky's reading discusses the idea that erotics are enhanced by what you don't see, and that representing suggestive/partially hidden movements enhances the viewer's own senses and response (pg. 95). While this image specific doll made by Bellmer exposes much of the female body, the doll is positioned in such a way that prevents a full view, and since it is only a print the viewer can not see it from different angles. The way the mannequin is lying curved on its back, with the head/mouth just barely touching the breasts, and its hand in proximity but just short of touching the rest of the body, are all details that makes the viewer to hint at what is not shown, leaves much for the imagination, and prompts desire.