Writing the Body

Catalog description

We each live in a body. And yet, what a body is - what it means, what it does, how it moves through the world - is anything but universal. A body is personal, but never private. It is shaped by history, by genetics, by performance, and by the gaze of others. It is a site of power and vulnerability. It is the place where things happen. "The body is our anchorage in the world," writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, yet it is also the thing that marks us as different, as other, as something to be disciplined or desired. Medicine purports to know the body, but increasingly at a distance. AI and digital technologies produce knowledge but have no bodies at all. What good is flesh? What, in the end, is a body worth? In this course, we will analyze and write about the body. We will decipher what it feels like to be inside one, and what it means to be seen or marked from the outside. We will consider bodies that are changed, bodies that are sick, bodies that refuse to behave. We will examine bodies across cultural, social, and historical contexts - the female body, the Black body, the disabled body - and think about notions of bodily comportment, discipline, pleasure, and imaginaries. We will interrogate how structural forces, medical narratives, and personal experiences shape our understanding of bodily difference and agency, drawing on scholarly works such as The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry and the anthology Beyond the Body Proper edited by Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar, as well as popular nonfiction like The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O'Rourke or The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. Each week, we will read a novel, memoir, or ethnography paired with medical texts, case studies, and fragments. We will trace stories across flesh and history. We will also take a class trip to the Body Worlds Decoded exhibit in San Jose, and our class will feature visits from or engagement with…