Welcome!

Welcome to WOMNST 1140: Gendered Bodies in Contemporary Visual Culture!

This is a course blog for an upper-division undergraduate Women's Studies seminar at the University of Pittsburgh.

This course will introduce students in Women’s Studies and related inter/disciplines to
questions of the body, and encourage the development of a critical visual literacy regarding various technologies of contemporary visual culture that are engaged by and construct bodies. The body remains one of the most significant cites for the enactment of power relations and is hence a vital site for their production, transformation, and critique. This course begins with the seemingly simple question “What is a Body?,” a question that will become the guide for the course as a whole as it interrogates the stakes that institutions such as law, medicine, and the state have in the answer. As the course progresses, it will become more apparent that not only is this not at all a simple question, or one with an answer we already know, but also that its very formulation often masks the particular
racial, gendered, and sexualized practices that produce embodied difference.

Centering a transnational feminist cultural studies approach, this course will explore a variety of contemporary visual imaging technologies that privilege the body and encourage students to develop critical analytical skills to interrogate the world in which they currently live. Analyzing the production, circulation, and consumption of visual cultural productions (in addition to their representational aspects), the course will ask what the role of visuality is in constructing ideologies of gender, race, sexuality, and national identity. Specifically we will focus on the ways that visual culture focused on the body travels within and across national borders, and the role of such gendered, racialized, and classed mobilities in colonialisms, capitalisms, and practices of war.

Each week, students will post 1 blog entry about the week's course materials by 9:00 pm on the date listed on the syllabus. Further, students will then post 2 comments on their classmates' blog posts by 9:00 pm on the next day. These comments should be thoughtful considerations, and are the place where you can ask questions about your classmates' posts, respond to questions they pose, link to other visual media, or evaluate what conversations your classmates' posts enable.

I encourage you to embed links in both your blog post and your comments to articles, definitions, and especially images, videos, and other web ephemera that you find relevant to the week's material. This is obviously a class about visual culture and imaging technologies, and I encourage you to link the scholarly articles and cultural productions from class to other visual media you encounter in your lives.

If you are new to blogging, don't fear--we will discuss this assignment throughly on the 1st day of class, as well as go over what constitutes a good blog post.