Don't Fuck Me When I'm Dead: the Post-Mortem Objectification of Famous Women
Sophia K’Lynn Brocatto is an undergraduate student in the Creative Writing department at the University of California, Riverside and is by all means, a bad-bitch.
Lithography of Julia Pastrana
The following is a collection of women whose lives and deaths were altered (more so than the average woman) by misogynistic and racist interpretations of beauty. Despite being some of the most remarkably well-preserved corpses, their histories have received little to no notoriety. These women were manipulated to the benefit of men in their lives, and in their deaths have become inexplicably entangled with the fantasies and shenanigans of the most vile and delusional creeps history has to offer. Lacking autonomy and agency in their lives, their dead bodies exploited for profit and adulation that often manifested through sexual gratification, these circumstances make it clear: if there is a womanly body, there is a man who desires to possess it.
Julia Pastrana, “The World’s Ugliest Woman,” was animalized and objectified by people’s stigmatic interpretations of her atypical appearance and spent her life as a traveling spectacle in the Victorian Era. Affected by gingival hyperplasia and hypertrichosis terminalis, respectively responsible for protruding gums mistaken for a snout and excessive dark coarse hair on the body and face; a doctor ‘diagnosed’ Julia as half human and half orangutan. Like her audience, Julia both admired and hated her physicality. She took pride in and meticulously groomed her beard, yet she believed her appearance would prevent her from finding love.
Born to the indigenous peoples in Sinaloa, Mexico, Julia spent her life bought and sold by various men. Originally sold by her uncle to the governor of Sinaloa, Pedro Sanchez, she was eventually purchased several times over until she was purchased by the last man who would own her while she was alive—Theodore Lent, The Most Despicable Man in the History of Ever ™. In what could have been a proposal to own her body and soul, Lent married Julia and fathered her child. Before and after their marriage, Lent forbade Julia from speaking or showing her face and had her wear a veil when she was not performing, so as not to jeopardize her monetary value.
While on tour, Julia died in childbirth at age twenty-six. Her unnamed child inherited hypertrichosis terminalis and died three days later. After the death of his wife and child, Lent had their corpses preserved by Professor Sukolov of Moscow University. Julia’s body was positioned with her hands on her hips, chest puffed out, and her beloved beard removed, eternally animalized in a false portrayal of power. Her son’s preservation was especially unfortunate. . I want to change this sentence to: Her son’s preservation was especially unfortunate, the infant was laterally impaled on a metal pole, which made him stand pin straight and rigid. The baby looked alien, not at all like the soft, rounded, chubby newborn he was. Lent would tour with the corpses for twenty-four more years. Lent eventually remarried Marie Bartel who had a similar “bearded lady” type condition. Bartel was renamed Zenora Pastrana, and toured, posing as Julia’s sister. For over a decade, she would perform, singing and dancing, on stage with the corpses of Julia and her son.
Julia and her son toured for another hundred years after Lent’s death. It wasn’t until 1972, when the public no longer found them palatable, that they were put into storage in Sweden. Later that same year, a group of teenagers broke into the facility and severely damaged the bodies. Julia’s arm was broken off and never found. What was left of her son was found mangled and eaten by wild animals in a field outside. His body was unsalvagable and discarded shortly afterwards. Julia’s body mysteriously went missing from the facility in 1979 and would not resurface until 1990 when she was discovered in a custodian closet at Oslo Forensic Institute. Julia’s body was not buried until one hundred and fifty three years after her death. Even then, the burial was only accomplished with the help of artist Laura Barbata who for nearly a decade, badgered the Norwegian government, demanding that Julia’s body be released. Julia is now buried in Sinaloa, Mexico, the home she had been denied in life and partially in death.
Julia’s story can be interpreted as the extent of damage and palatability of classism, racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism. The way Theodore Lent, and many others, puppeteered Julia in life and death, through silencing, veiling, and embalming, speaks to the worst of what society has to offer. Julia, “The World’s Ugliest Woman'', “The Ape Woman,” “The Dog-Faced Woman,” and “The Nondescript,” had spent her life performing a strange balance between the masculine and feminine, between human and animal, hated and beloved by the Victorian Era, an era that seems to have defined the Eurocentric ideal that has seized the world in a choke hold. These stage names and the kitschy retellings act to disguise the reality of Julia’s experiences and no one seems willing to tell her life in blunt truths. Julia was an enslaved woman of color, sold at the age of nine, and paraded around by profiting white men, who abused her and her son’s autonomy and agency.
The corpse of Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos (1909–1931) encased in wax and plaster circa 1940.
Seventy years after Julia’s death, the embalming world had a new star. Elena de Hoyos was born in Key West, Florida in 1909. She suffered from and ultimately died of tuberculosis at twenty-two years old. In the last years of her life, she became acquainted with Carl Tanzler, a radiologist who became obsessed with her. Tanzler, the radiologist, would assume full control of Elena’s medical procedures using unapproved radiation treatments of his own design. Elena’s family insisted that she was not romantically, or platonically interested in a relationship with Tanzler, and only accepted the aid of a strange man because he insisted on paying for all medical expenses. Any documentation of Elena’s thoughts on the subject has, unfortunately, been lost to history.
After Elena died, Tanzler commissioned a death mask and mausoleum in her honor. Unbeknownst to anyone, Elena’s body had been submerged in formaldehyde, which preserved her during the years she resided in the tomb. Tanzler made nightly visits to her tomb, but after two years, he could not bear to be parted from her any longer. Tanzler stole Elena’s body from the mausoleum and brought her to his home; conveniently, his wife and children lived in a separate structure across town. After removing her from the formaldehyde preservation chamber that was her casket, Elena began to deteriorate quickly. Thus, Tanzler went great lengths to attempt to preserve the body such as tying the joints together with wire hangers and piano wire, stuffing the abdominal cavity with newspapers and rags, and covering the rotting flesh in wax-soaked cloths. Tanzler would go as far as constructing an artificial vaginal canal with a paper tube he inserted into the pubis region. He lived this way for seven years.
Eventually, Elena’s family became suspicious after several neighbors reported Tanzler dancing and carrying on with a giant doll in his home. Authorities apprehended him and returned Elena’s body to her family’s custody. Due to the statute of limitations, Tanzler was not charged with a crime and was released from police custody and pronounced sane after undergoing a psych evaluation. After his release, Tanzler demanded that Elena be returned to him, a request her family denied. In retaliation, Tanzler blew up Elena’s mausoleum with a homemade bomb. In 1952, Tanzler was found dead in his home, the one he lived in with his wife and children, next to an effigy dedicated to Elena and a crudely constructed paper mâché life size doll that wore Elena’s death mask.
If Julia’s story represented the vileness of society, Elena’s speaks to male entitlement produced, and upheld, by patriarchal ideologies. Carl Tanzler’s obsession with a dream, in which his dead ancestor revealed to him the face of his true love, which he believed to be Elena, served as his claim to Elena’s person. It is incredibly interesting and perplexing that the root of Tanzler’s obsession revolved around Elena’s image. There isn’t any documentation of him appreciating her intellect, her humor, her love for life, or anything implying that he enjoyed her personhood. There are pages and pages of him idolizing and exploiting her body. In the most popular retellings of these grotesque events, Tanzler is the story’s focal point, and is commended for his dedication to ‘true love’. However, Tanzler’s idea of true love revolved around forcing his will and carnal desires onto a corpse.
While the lives of these women have been partially lost to history, the next entry on this list of historic embalmed persons is a pop culture icon, what is more, Eva Perón was a famous political figure. So famous, in fact, she was even played by Madonna in the film version of her own musical, which surprisingly did not detail the travels of her embalmed corpse.
In 1950, Eva Perón, wife of the President of Argentina, Juan Perón, collapsed in public. A medical examination revealed she had an aggressive case of ovarian cancer. Both the public and Eva would be kept in the dark and were told that she had appendicitis. It was during this time that her husband announced his candidacy for his second Argentinian presidential term. Eva had been an essential part of his first election’s publicity campaign. Even before her marriage, Eva was a household name in Argentina as a popular actress, model, and radio talk show host. After her marriage, she would use any platform available to her to campaign for her husband. She had also established the Women’s Perónist Party and advocated for women's suffrage, in the hopes of getting her husband additional votes. Eva wanted to campaign as her husband’s Vice President during his second campaign, but, due to political hostility and declining health, she was instead given the bogus title, “Spiritual Leader of the Nation of Argentina''.
During her acceptance parade in May of 1952, it was noted that Eva behaved very strangely; she appeared slumped over and half-asleep. This behavior has been attributed to Eva being so ill, she was unable to stand. Instead, she was propped up by caster undergarments and her husband held her upright and helped her wave her arms in celebration. It is unknown if her posture and dazed behavior can solely be attributed to her debilitating ailment or the partial frontal lobotomy that had been ordered by her husband. Eva remained ignorant of her cancer, which had advanced quickly, eating her alive. She had been in so much pain, the frontal lobotomy was a last effort to relieve her suffering. Through the duration of Eva’s sickness, Juan Perón had ordered for family physicians to keep quiet, even after they performed a full hysterectomy, disguised as an appendectomy, implemented new (read crude) medicine known as chemotherapy, and finally, the frontal lobotomy. She died shortly afterwards in July.
Prior to her death, Juan Perón had asked Pedro Ara, an eccentric man known to carry human heads on his person, to embalm Eva’s corpse for display outside of the Argentinian Presidential home. Upon her death, Juan Perón honored Eva by commissioning a mausoleum and statue larger than the Statue of Liberty which was only half built before it was knocked down by Anti- Perónist protesters Shortly after Eva was put on display, a coup had been launched against Juan Perón. With his new wife Isabel, he fled to Spain leaving Eva’s corpse behind.
The new President Aramburu feared the martyrdom and Perónist sympathy Eva’s corpse represented to the people of Argentina, and ordered her removal from the country. Eva’s body would go missing for seventeen years after these orders. The most popular account of the body’s whereabouts during this time comes from the book Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez who is known to tell fantastical stories in the guise of nonfiction. That said, he insists the following is true. Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Koenig, a vocal Anti-Perónonist, who was known to have a bad temperament, was tasked with the removal of Eva’s body, but instead, shockingly became obsessed with it. After storing the corpse in various locations, he settled on his office in the Army Intelligent Service headquarters. There he would invite people to watch him fondle, urinate and masturbate onto the body, along with a variety of other unfavorable acts of necrophilia. One could speculate that Koenig used Eva’s body as a vessel to belittle the opposing political party. Seventeen years later, President Aramburu would later locate the body, and as is public knowledge, she was buried under a pseudonym in Milan… That is until the corpse was dug up and returned to Juan Perón shortly before his return to Argentina, where he served as President again, after the death of President Aramburu.
Eventually, Eva’s body was returned to her family and buried in the family plot… That is until the corpse of Aramburu was kidnapped and ransomed for a list of demands, including the return of Eva’s body to a public display. The Argentinian government cooperated with the demands, although Eva’s body is not technically on display. She remains in a steel bunker under a mausoleum, behind two steel doors.
Pedro Ara inspects Eva Perón's embalmed corpse
Elena de Hoyos may have been referred to as a postmortem doll, but Eva had been fashioned into a political puppet. In life, she was made to be the face of the Perónist party, an identity that was projected onto her body after death. Juan Perón could not have amassed the following he had without her constant campaigning and image. Although she is historically depicted championing women’s suffrage in Argentina, she claimed to have done so in the name of her husband. In reality she had no political agency of her own other than believing that women shouldn’t vote, and that feminism should be denounced.
She was so important to Juan Perón’s presidential campaign that in the last months of her life while sick, brain altered, and practically immobile, her husband literally propped her up to keep her image out in the streets of Argentina. Clearly, he knew how important she was as a political tool, having commissioned her embalming prior to her death. Others knew her power as well; President Aramburu sent her body away fearing public dissent, Lieutenant Colonel Koenig, supposedly, defiled her body for years, having the corpse receive the displaced rage he felt for the political party he was sworn to fight against, lastly, let’s not forget the ransommers who demanded her body be put back on display for all to see.
The last installation in this collection, represents the extent of feminine objectification. Julia, Elena, and Eva had left behind corpses that were imbued with their identities after death, La Pascualita however, is an object that has been attributed with a feminine identity. People come from miles around to a popular Mexican bridal shop, La Popular, to see La Pascualita, a life-like mannequin. Rumor has it, Pascuala Esparza, the owner of the bridal store, was so devastated by the death of his daughter in 1930, he had her preserved and put in the shop window. Whether or not Pascuala Esparza actually had a daughter is unknown, however, La Pascualita is obviously not a preserved corpse. No matter what secret embalming method is used, a body cannot survive for eighty years in a window display in the middle of the Mexican desert. Despite this, the myth perseveres and continues to drive patrons into the store’s open doors. La Pascualita was never a person or a corpse, but the myth around her is similar to the women in this collection. A womanly shaped object propped up and obsessed over, ultimately benefiting those around her through financial gain.
I had never seriously considered my ‘postmortem experience’ because I’m not afraid of dying. I don’t believe in spirits or the afterlife. From my limited funeral procession experience, I know that I don’t care for the sterility and disconnect produced by being buried in, what is essentially, a giant metal trash can. In fact, I had joked about the possible disposal of my body. My favorite scenario involved mixing my ashes with glitter and then shooting this sparkly concoction from a cannon—a bombastic firework, to be consumed by my peers, like Donny’s send off in The Big Lebowski. I imagined them coughing up my glittery remains for weeks.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
I wasn’t worried about death.
To be honest, a corpse is just an empty vessel. That being said, there is an admirable quality in handling our dead as though they are still alive. We treat our deceased with care as a way to deal with our own grief, in a last performance of love and kindness. Keeping your loved ones close and idolizing them after death has a romantic appeal that I sympathize with, but please note the phrase “loved ones.” Now I feel like I have to make sure I write, “Please do not fuck me when I am dead,” in my will, because it wasn’t obvious before.
I struggle to define myself, and am constantly batted back and forth by womanhood as engendered by patriarchy and Womanhood as defined by the culminating performances of that gender. I recognize the relationships between the body and consciousness, and the feminine identity and the self as tainted. I see it in the way I look at myself in the mirror, and in the way my little sister watches me looking at myself. Nonetheless, I thought there was a sanctity in the relationship between feminized consciousness and the body. But if men like Koenig, Lent, Tanzler, and Perón can manipulate the body and image of women to fulfill their expectations of womanhood, what use is there in a ‘being for herself’, that is a being made subject for the sake of experiencing a feminine identity? These men chose to imbue these corpses with a feminine identity, not to revere the dead, but to abuse, to fuck, and to objectify them. I write this piece as a eulogy to Womanhood as defined by women. I didn’t understand how fragile the crux of my identity was, or how viciously and easily it could be perverted.
I spent months thinking about and collecting the stories of these women, compiling facts from iterations of the truth, spread by people who were perhaps not as rigorous in the discipline of non-fiction as they should have been. Despite all the time I have put into this project, I fear I am still ignorant of the truth and blinded to the severity of these crimes against humanity. We will never know if Julia picked out a name for her child, or if Elena knew what a total creep Tanzler was, or if Eva Perón suspected she was dying, or if Pascuala Esparza had a daughter. Perhaps, these events are so grotesque and vivid because they exemplify the limitations women have over their autonomy. These instances of preservation and necrophilia served as a means to manipulate and own these women in the truest sense. The repeated denial of their subjectivity is possibly the most deplorable aspect of these stories, or maybe, it’s the revelation that we never had autonomy to begin with, and that people will sit back and applaud as you are trivialized, objectified, and commodified.
I now fear death. Not in the sense that my life will come to an end, but I fear the end of the working definition of Womanhood. I fear the manipulation of my corpse as a means to end Womanhood. I fear that people will champion their desires and use my body to achieve them after my death, and fear that they do it now, while I am still breathing.