Having a Body, Being a Body

Catalog description

This course places the body at the heart of human experience. It revolves around the question of how human bodies produce, mediate or are imbued with meaning. We will follow work that problematizes what we mean when we talk about "the body," tracing a progressive move away from Cartesian dualisms—mind/body, nature/culture—and towards an understanding of bodies as contingent, malleable, dynamic, relational and experiential entities. Bodies as enigmatic meaning-making sites are not biologically fixed, skin-bounded, individual surfaces onto which social meaning is projected. On the contrary, the pieces we will discuss outline a complex engagement with corporeal polysemy that disallows a definition of the body as either material and biological, or symbolic and socially constructed. However, the more recent approaches to embodiment and corporeality must not be read as displacing earlier concerns with political economy and social categories of differentiation—such as gender, sex, race or class—as instruments of oppression, violence, and resistance. The theoretical tensions we will explore push towards a dynamic materiality of the body always in relation to other, human and nonhuman, bodies and to power. They also provide a broad understanding of diverse experiences of the body across regions and cultures (the Americas, African and Asian diasporas).