Dr Leticia Ines Alexandre Sabsay Tower 1.11.01D

This course is available on the MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

‘Bodies, Culture and Politics’ explores different constructions and understandings of gendered 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 and activism, cultural practices, and performance, anti-racist, multicultural and diversity politics, popular mobilisations, and precarity and anti-austerity social movements, among others.

20 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

The course runs in weeks 1-11. Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce 1 exercise, 1 essay and 1 presentation in the LT.

500 words critical reading of an assigned text in week 3.

1,500 words essay to be submitted in week 6.

Group presentation in class between weeks 7 and 11.

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

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.

Essay to be submitted in the first week of the ST.