Dr Leticia Sabsay

This course is available on the MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Rights and Human Rights), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security 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 has a limited number of places (it is controlled access) and demand is typically very high. Priority is given to Department of Gender Studies students. 

‘Bodies, Culture and Politics’ explores different understandings of "the human body," 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 debates within the social sciences and the humanities, and 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 in the WT. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of WT. 

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

• Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology
• Butler, Judith (2014) Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly
• Crimp, Douglas (2002) Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics
• 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.