In the period between 1500 to 1700 in Europe, comprehension of the eye’s anatomy, physiology, and pathology significantly expanded, and the relationship between the human eye and knowledge was also fundamentally reformulated. This dissertation tells the story of this transformation through the intersection between medicine and art, and via the eyes and hands of a group of medical and artisanal practitioners in the German speaking lands. From the sixteenth century onwards, an increasing number of people from diverse social classes and professions were engaged in investigating the structure, workings, and disorders of the eye, including surgeons, artisans, physicians, and natural philosophers. Manifold ways of knowing formed ophthalmic knowledge, from practical making and doing to theoretical construction. The understandings and findings were communicated through a wide range of media, not only in texts, but also frequently via images and objects, such as illustrated books, anatomical models, prostheses, and optical devices. They were widely circulated across Europe and collected by scholars, amateurs, and princely rulers alike. Surgeons and artisans were among the most notable yet understudied groups of investigators in this endeavor. They shared expertise in materials, proficiency in manual work, and modes of investigating nature through bodily engagement. With their close collaboration to create pictures and artifacts, they were instrumental in developing insights about the eye. Their image- and object-making put forward a persistent claim about the value of their embodied and experiential knowledge, through which these practitioners undermined the traditional hierarchy of professional structures and scholarly knowledge systems. Knowledge of the eye not only constituted a critical branch of artistic and medical investigation, but was also of wider cultural and epistemological significance. To understand the structure and function of the eye was to reflect on the very foundation of knowledge.

This dissertation examines the role of scientific and medical disciplines in the construction of homosexuality in Mexico, and how non-normative gender and sexual subjects engaged in political activism, body modifications, and aesthetic production to challenge the pathologizing discourses reinforced by the increasing authority of the biomedical sciences. Chapter 1 examines the role of photography as a medical instrument in the first documented sex-reassignment treatment in the Western Hemisphere performed by Mexican physician and sexologist Rafael Sandoval Camacho in the early 1950s, and how his patient Marta Olmos, Mexico’s first transsexual woman, embraced photojournalism as a medium to document, archive, and validate her identity as a woman. In chapter 2, I examine the popular phenomenon of publishing photographs of erotized trans sex workers known as Mujercitos during the 1970s in Alarma!, Mexico’s most influential crime tabloid magazine, and how these marginalized subjects appropriated biomedical technologies like “sex hormones” intended to regulate gender and sexual deviance to construct bodily identities that challenged the medical and criminological positions on the essentialist natures of gender expression, sexual desire, and the sexed body. Chapter 3 examines the early gay narrative of Luis Zapata and José Rafael Calva that emerged in conjunction to Mexico’s Homosexual Liberation Movement in the late 1970s. My analysis demonstrates how Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia Roma [Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel] (1979), and Calva’s Utopía gay [Gay Utopia] (1983) present sharp critiques shared by Mexico’s homosexual liberation groups on the growing authority of disciplines like psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and biomedicine in pathologizing homosexuality. Chapter 4 examines the changing understandings of homosexuality, homosexual desire, and the homosexual body during the HIV/AIDS crisis through the work of Julio Galán, Nahum B. Zenil, and art collective Taller Documentación Visual. My analysis presents the role of the HIV virus not as an explicit visual reference but rather as an elusive, spectral, and dangerous entity that is identifiable through the aesthetic and formal composition of the artists’ works, best exemplified by the references to condoms as physical and symbolic devices in the mediation of gay sexual contact and desire. This dissertation demonstrates the critical roles of biomedicine, criminology, sexology, and psychiatry in regulating diverse forms of Mexican homosexualities, while simultaneously functioning as liminal disciplines strategically adopted by homosexual subjects to redefine, shape, and validate their desired bodily, sexual, and subjective identities.