Be a Doll, Blow a Hero

Abstract

Abstract The medical term apparently drowned emerged in the mid-eighteenth century to describe a kaleidoscopic gap between potential life and potential death. The “seemingly,” or “so far as one can judge” dead, unbreathing body embodied a moment of possibility if only one knew how to actively extract it. As drowning became a focus of social attention, interest gathered around developing resuscitation methods and materials. The article tracks the contiguity of the apparently drowned body with other partially animated proxies: diagrams, drawings, paintings, casts, corpses, masks, dolls, and models—all of which became foils by which to practice affective responses to particular human bodies in particular sorts of trouble and nodes through which community could be practiced and interpellated through ideologies of rescue and feelings of responsibility.