Summer 2013

The body has always been a key site for interpretation. The question of how to read bodies in their myriad roles as targets (and agents) of disciplinary power, as the embodiment of Nature and the expression of modem cultural logics of gender, race, sexuality, and nation opens up a wide new field for thinking about the ways bodies work and how they "mean." A heavily interdisciplinary exploration of the body, this course ranges from the reading of bodies in scientific, sociological, literary, and historical texts to interrogating the representation of the body in anthropological, philosophical, photographic, art historical and cinematic sources. Topics will include: Discipline and the modem body; cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification or "somatechnics"; sexual violence and narratives of trauma; commodity culture and media constructions of the body; eating disorders and cultural constructions of gender; diseased bodies, hysteria and psychoanalysis; transnational bodies and the politics oflabor; technology and embodiment in a digital age. Some of the key questions that will structure our work include: What does it mean to explore the body as a socially meaningful, historical object of analysis rather than as a purely "biological entity"? How do we defme "deviant" bodies and which bodies get to count as "normal"? How does our understanding of Nature and Culture,authenticity and artifice structure our beliefs about the body and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race? What does it mean to be "embodied" and how does embodiment complicate some of the ways we think about identity and difference? Authors may include: Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Michel Foucault, Judith Halberstam, Nancy Tuana, Alice Sebold, Margaret Atwood, Susan Bordo and Kobena Mercer. Films may include: Jennie Livingston's "Paris Is Burning" (1992) and Lauren Greenfield's "Thin" (2006).