Performativity and the Body: Staging Gender, Staging Race

Catalog description

This course examines how we develop and interrogate different meanings around our bodies through performance practices in everyday life and on stage. Specifically, we analyze how race and gender are regulated, reinforced, reworked, and subverted through embodied modes of performance. We explore how raced and gendered bodies are constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed through everyday performances of self from fashion to food to surgery. We will also examine works by playwrights, visual artists, and theatre artists who deploy performance practices to make, unmake, and remake historical, social, and political understandings of our bodies as raced and gendered.