For Gianna Bouchard, a specimen is both a physical, conceptual, and experiential entity. Medicine produces specimens when it transforms human bodies into objects of knowledge that it performs, stages, frames, displays, narrates, or mediates. The procedures by which a subject becomes an object of display or investigation are, Bouchard suggests, a kind of violence: dissection, excision, exposure, pathologization, commodification, or quantification. As such, the specimen engenders “spectatorial anxiety and ethical queasiness” (28). And yet, she contends, specimenhood is now a pervasive, normalized component of contemporary subjectivity: with our Fitbits, reality TV wellness regimens, and 23andMe swabs, we are all now engaged in medical self‐objectification, self‐optimization, or self‐display.

These are the premises of Bouchard’s timely yet historically grounded study, which presents a genealogy of specimenhood from its humanist Renaissance origins to its future‐present in molecular biomedicine, drawing examples from popular culture, museum collections, exhibitions, and bioethics case history. The book’s primary interest, however, is in experimental performance. Because it is inherently performative, Bouchard argues, specimenhood can also be performed critically: contested or subverted by artists taking issue with the medicalization of the self.

The volume is structured in two parts. In the first, Bouchard ably synthesizes existing scholarship on the spectacular epistemology of early anatomical theatres and offers readings of much‐studied medical objects such as 19th‐century wax obstetric Venuses, the HeLa cell line, and Gunther von Hagens’s unavoidable Body Worlds franchise. She offers a useful chapter that surveys the legal and bioethical frameworks that prevail over anatomical dissection, display, and the use of biomaterials, and an explanation of how the trajectory of Michel Foucault’s work parallels and illuminates the specimen’s history, from the penetrating clinical gaze theorized in The Birth of the Clinic (1973), to the anatomizing logic of biopower in Discipline and Punish (1977), and finally the biopolitical regulation of species life from his later lectures.

In the second section of the book, Bouchard turns to contemporary performances that “subvert, queer and otherwise undermine” the dynamics of medicalization (4). She begins by addressing the historical legacies of specimen display in Clod Ensemble’s work An Anatomie in Four Quarters (2011), which experiments with the visual economy of anatomical science, and the narrative performance of Mat Fraser (Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability Was Kept in a Box, 2012–2014), who speaks back to medical museums that still exhibit differently abled bodies (like his own) as objects. An excellent chapter on queer specimens examines solo artists (Peggy Shaw, Martin O’Brien, Paul B. Preciado) who appropriate medical ways of knowing to reimagine bodies that are continually (re)constituted by their entanglement with technological, pharmaceutical, human, or nonhuman others. Her final two chapters place the specimen in the context of contemporary molecular biomedicine. Bioartists ORLAN and Kira O’Reilly self‐experiment with tissue culture to raise bioethical questions about the boundaries between human and nonhuman, and the disposable bodies that support the global economy of bioresource exchange. Meanwhile Deborah Stein and Suli Holum’s play Chimera (2012) asks how we can sustain identity and belonging in the face of genetic information that contradicts our social knowledge of ourselves, that reveals the singular “I” as genetically plural.

Bouchard’s analysis of these artists is inspired by scholars in the feminist and medical posthumanities, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies such as Rosi Braidotti and Margrit Shildrick, whose work troubles the normative, humanist assumptions about embodiment and subjectivity that anchor performance studies. Indeed, Bouchard promises a “new conceptual framework” (21) for the discipline. However, her treatment of the performance studies literature is cursory, and her argument is underpinned by assumptions familiar to and long‐critiqued within the field: performers exercise agency (conflated with human intention), which resists, transgresses, or subverts disciplinary forces (see for example Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else [Reference McKenzie2001]). Medicine is objectifying; performance is subjectifying. This framework both robs her critique of medicine of nuance (she deems it dehumanizing, “brutalizing,” “pornographic”), and has the ironic effect of reinstalling the liberal humanist idea of the rights‐bearing subject that she wishes to critique. The artist is the performer and protagonist in this book: individuated, efficacious, and endowed with dignity and sovereign consciousness that allows them to postulate “proper ethical relations to body parts” (20). So while Bouchard illuminates how specimenhood violates distinctions between person and thing, body and technology, individual and collective, whole and part, human and nonhuman, articulate bodies and disposable ones, the performing subject she imagines aligns with only the privileged term of such binaries. This is doubly problematic given that Bouchard’s performers are uniformly white, Euro‐American (largely British) artists, mostly affiliated with institutions of higher education — a limitation she does not address.

Nevertheless, this is a provocative and thoughtful volume and a critical record of some remarkable performance work. I hope that it inspires further theoretical attention to the medical humanities within performance studies.