This graduate-level course provides an introduction to the main scholars in the field, including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Aijaz Ahmad, Anne McClintock, Leela Ghandi, and Stuart Hall. The course is organized thematically, beginning with a critical introduction to the field, then moving through colonial discourse, anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism. We also look at intersections with Marxism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis.
Bodies That Matter: The Body and Sexuality in Contemporary Theory and Criticism (Glick)
Long regarded by the Western intellectual tradition as inferior and threatening to the mind (or thinking self), the body has made a comeback in contemporary scholarship in the humanities. In this course, we will critically examine the sudden efflorescence of "body criticism" since the 1970s, focusing in particular on the fields of literary criticism, cultural history, critical theory, and cultural studies. As we shall see, this new body theory has several distinctive characteristics: it interrogates traditional binaries (such as mind/body, nature/culture, male/female); it critiques essentialist and ahistorical notions of bodies as fixed or given; and it seeks to demonstrate how the body and sexuality are sites of cultural meaning and social control. Although we will survey a wide range of representations and images of the body, this class is not a "tour" of those diverse representations; instead, we will investigate the intellectual and political implications of various approaches to theorizing bodies (or bodily experience) in time and space. We will explore questions such as: How are bodies produced as cultural objects with racialized, gendered and sexual meanings? What is the relationship between the body itself and its representation in discourse? How do sexed, corporeal categories and norms organize modern configurations of identity, power, and knowledge? And finally-in a more self-reflexive vein-why is contemporary criticism so preoccupied with the materiality of the body? Readings include work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Bordo, Peter Brooks, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Sander Gilman, Donna Haraway, Thomas Lacqueur, and Kobena Mercer.
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