For decades, museums and exhibitors displayed Baartman’s body as proof of Linnaeus’s characterization of non-Europeans as biologically alien. Plaster casts of her body, enlarged illustrations, and even a stuffed display of her actual skin appeared in museums and exhibits across the continent, including at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, where tens of millions marveled at her ordinary human body, as if it were somehow distinct from their own. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about his visit to the Musée de l’homme in 1987. He found the jar of preserved genitalia Cuvier had
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