'Doing Gender' at Body Worlds: Embodying Field Trips as Affective Educational Experience

This paper discusses the background, experience and outcomes of an explicitly feminist field trip to Gunther von Hagen's Body Worlds 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. The cultural landscape of this exhibition materialized gendered geographies very powerfully, facilitating observation and analysis of embodied and emotional, social and spatial relations examined by students of two participating courses: 'Gender and the City', and 'Geographies of Embodiment and Emotion'. Beyond its examination of often shocking and stereotypically gendered displays, the paper presents a challenge to research as well as teaching orthodoxy, arguing that its (student/teacher) collaborative authorship is in itself a form of feminist practice which disrupts author-itative geographical knowledge.