Course Description
Section outline
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This course introduces students to the feminist scholarship on the body and embodiment. We explore the place of the body in gender theory, activism and corporeal feminism and address the questions: How do bodies get sexed, gendered and racialised? What is the importance of biological understandings for feminist scholarship of the body? What methods and frameworks are used to understand the agency of bodily materiality and its relations to cultural discourses and meanings? How do we evaluate bodily transformations (e.g. modifications through surgery) and ‘bodily integrity’ if bodies are always relationally constituted? Throughout the course we will reflect on the affects and orientations produced by reading particular texts and how we as researchers (and activists) and the texts we read and produce are implicated in particular body politics. Here the course introduces students to the method of memory work where students write, collectively analyse and experiment with alternative re-enactments of memories of embodied experience.
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