GI428 Half Unit
Bodies, Culture and Politics
This information is for the 2020/21 session.
Teacher responsible
Dr Leticia Ines Alexandre Sabsay Pankhurst House.11.01D
Availability
This course is available on the MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.
Course content
‘Bodies, Culture and Politics’ explores different constructions and understandings of gendered, racialised and sexualised bodies, with a focus on how these have been mobilised by transnational artistic and cultural practices and politics of resistance. Bodies have been at the centre of renewed debates in the light of the emergence of new critical approaches within the social sciences and the humanities and the developments of the natural sciences. Parallel to these debates, increasing attention has been paid to the significance of bodies in contemporary democratic politics. In the last decades, the uses of bodies and the arts in popular mobilisations and political activism have acquired renewed relevance, hand in hand with transnational dialogues and exchanges. Focusing on these trends, the course considers different theoretical approaches to bodies and embodiment (i.e. phenomenological, deconstructivist, materialist, psychoanalytic), and a set of related areas of inquiry, including the materiality of bodies, the differential value socially assigned to bodies, the affective dimension of embodiment, intersectional processes of racialisation, gendering and sexualisation, vulnerability, beauty ideals, and (dis)ability. These questions will inform our exploration of the imaginaries of the body mobilised by feminist and queer political art, activism, and cultural practices, as well as popular mobilisations and anti-racist and anti-austerity social movements, among others.
Teaching
The course runs across the LT. It contains both asynchronous and interactive teaching and learning elements.
Formative coursework
Students will be expected to produce 1 essay and 1 presentation in the LT.
Indicative reading
Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology
Braidotti, Rosi (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory
Butler, Judith (2014) Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly
Crimp, Douglas (2002) Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics
Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (2000) Global Nature, Global Culture
Griznik, Marina and Sefik Seki Tatlik (2014) Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism
Pollock, Griselda (2013) After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum
Salamon, Gayle (2010) Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetoric of Materiality
Tate, Shirley (2015) Black Women’s Bodies and the Nation: Race, Gender and Culture
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.
Important information in response to COVID-19
Please note that during 2020/21 academic year some variation to teaching and learning activities may be required to respond to changes in public health advice and/or to account for the situation of students in attendance on campus and those studying online during the early part of the academic year. For assessment, this may involve changes to mode of delivery and/or the format or weighting of assessments. Changes will only be made if required and students will be notified about any changes to teaching or assessment plans at the earliest opportunity.
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Total students 2019/20: 40
Average class size 2019/20: 13
Controlled access 2019/20: Yes
Value: Half Unit
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills
