Controversial Bodies: Visions of Beauty

Catalog description

Controversial Bodies: Visions of Beauty will foster a discussion of bodily beauty across the multiples fields of theater, dance, history and sociology. In creating a course that holds these two physical markers, the body and beauty, at its core, a space can be filled within the university's curriculum where central to the course is the notion that the body is a social and cultural entity and that, markers of bodily beauty are constructed differently across various cultures and time periods. In particular, Controversial Bodies: Visions of Beauty, examines how figures in the performing arts have pulled the make-up of beauty in opposite directions, reinforcing or subverting the norms of what is socially and politically acceptable, playing with nudity, androgyny and ugliness, and rewriting the markers of beauty in terms of race, gender, age and bodily type.