Relatable Content?: Identification, Identity, and Difference

Catalog description

What do we mean when we call something relatable? Which relations do we mean and between whom? And in what ways might this demand for relatability be gendered or even gendering? Moreover, does prizing relatability necessarily mean privileging the general over the specific, the familiar over the strange, the known over the unknowable? In other words, does centering relatability mean overwriting difference? Or, is rendering something relatable what enables connections to be forged across difference? Which ethical and political possibilities does this fantasy of sameness (“it me”) open up and which does it foreclose? In this second-year seminar, we will take up these questions through an examination of aesthetic and theoretical works from the nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, we will analyze the ways in which works of art invite us to connect and to what ends.