The Rhetorical Plasticity of the Dead in Museum Displays: A Biocritique of Missing Intercultural Awareness

Using rhetorical analysis in the form of an autoethnographically informed biocritique, this study applies and expands the concept of rhetorical plasticity to examine the popular museum exhibit Bodies: The Exhibition, which is arguably the most controversial of a series of contemporary museum exhibits that feature deceased human bodies that have been plasticized and entertainingly displayed for public viewing in museums in cities worldwide. We investigate how rhetorical tropes, such as biological and health discourses that pleasantly effuse reason, and fun action poses, operate synergistically to invite audiences into a forgetting of cultural awareness and personal biography in exhibits that display unknown Chinese bodies to Western audiences.