Visualizing Gender

Catalog description

This course analyzes how gender identities relate to the creation, use, and analysis of visual artifacts and bodily practices. Visual texts condition and are conditioned by intersectional embodiments of gender. In an attempt to understand and critically evaluate the role visual culture plays in our gendered lives as a dominant conduit of knowledge and identity production, this seminar examines visual processes and objects as they are informed and shaped by a nexus of gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and other forms of identity. The visualization of gendered forms of identity involves codes that produce bodies as signifiers of chaos, order, beauty, disease, nature, culture, evil, and virtue, including actions bisected according to binaries of masculinity and femininity. The seminar employs analytical approaches to these dynamics, including feminist, queer, and critical race theories of the visual as ways of interrogating a range of visual artifacts and bodily practices. After surveying key foundational texts, the course predominantly engages contemporary works and practices along complex gender matrices, including new directions in visual culture from the 1990s onward.