Anti-Social Reproduction: Art, Activism and the Question of Reproductive Labor

Catalog description

Combining art making with the close reading of scholarly texts and media objects, this course engages with the categories of ‘reproduction’ and ‘reproductive labor’ as complex and contradictory sites of activist and aesthetic involvement. We explore 20th and early 21st century traditions of feminist, queer and anti-colonial activism and aesthetics for what they teach us about the uneasy status of the ‘social’ and its reproduction as a semi-autonomous realm. How might we represent the realm of reproduction and reproductive labor when it is at once culturally devalued and obscured even as its representatives are idealized (or vilified) in highly classed, raced and gendered terms—as selfless mothers, prostitutes, mammies, 'essential workers,' etc.? Such questions demand a variety of approaches and students may choose to engage the course primarily through written assignments, artistic projects or a combination of both.