History of the Body

Catalog description

This course provides students with an overview of the contribution of intelectual and cultural historians to the field of "body history." HIST 535 History of the Body (3) This course exposes students to the contribution of intellectual and cultural historians to the field of "body history." Ranging from the late medieval to early twentieth century, the course will focus attention on the early modern period. Inspired by the writings of Ernst Kantorowicz, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler, among others, historians have demonstrated that bodies are not exempt from social, cultural, or ideological regimes of power. As a metaphor for the body politic or an instrument of power, the corporeal order is shown to have physical, social, symbolic, and political effects. As historians continue to demonstrate, the body has a history: which involves health, sickness and food, gestures and movement, sartorial codes and sumptuary regulations, gender taboos and sexual prohibitions. Studies of the body demand a multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, this course explores how historians have drawn upon visual as well as textual sources, and crossed disciplinary boundaries in order to better appreciate the entire range of bodily representations in the past.