Dr Leticia Sabsay

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.

This course is limited to 30 students.

‘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.

The course runs across the LT. It contains both asynchronous and interactive teaching and learning elements.

In line with department policy, this course will have a reading week in week 6.

Students will be expected to produce 1 project and 1 presentation in the LT.

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%, 3000 words) in the ST.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.