Body Politics: Gender, Culture, and Representation

Catalog description

This course examines the body as a contested site of both pleasure and oppression. Students will focus on the impact of culture on our understandings of the body, including ideas about gender, race, and sexuality. Course materials and lectures will illuminate how popular representations of the body such as advertising images are manipulated, but students will also discuss how even scientific representations of the body are shaped by cultural values and political goals. Over the semester, they will be asked to consider the ways in which bodies are highly politicized cultural constructs, not simple and natural facts of human existence. To understand this, students will look at the body as a site of social regulation through systems of oppression and resistance to that oppression. They will use an intersectional approach and draw on theories of oppression as articulated by Kimberle Crenshaw, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon. To demonstrate how embodiment is both a physical and political condition, students investigate how meanings associated with the body change depending on the time and context in which we live. As such, we are all encouraged to consider how our own body image has been shaped by social norms that are often simultaneously accepted and resisted. This course provides an opportunity to question a variety of norms surrounding the body including ideas about beauty, size, shape, and ability.