Schedule


Course Schedule

What is a Body? What is Visual Culture?

Key Concepts: Social construction, essentialism, racial formation/racialization, making sex, body v. subject, the body and U.S. national identity, spectacle and power

Cultural Production: U.S. Census Racial Categories 1790-1990 (handout); 2008 U.S. Presidential Inauguration images (shown in class)     

August 31                    
  • Welcome: introduction to course, syllabus and assignments, blogging groups
September 2               
  • Cavallaro, Dani. “Why the Body?” and “The Body in the Visual Field.” The Body for Beginners. London: Writers and Readers, Ltd., 1998. 4-7, 100-119. 
  • Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. “Racial Formation.” Racial Formation in the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. 53-76.
September 7               
  • Butler, Judith. “Bodies That Matter.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge, 1999. 235-45.           
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)

State Bodies and Biopolitics

Key Concepts: Biopower and biopolitics, panopticon and spectacle, law and the body, surveillance, critiques of reproductive futurity, imperialism and state use of reproductive bodies

Cultural Production: Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006 (film—on reserve at Hillman Library)

September 9               
  • Foucault, Michel. “17 March 1976.” Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador, 2003. 239-64.
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)
September 14                         
  • Davin, Anna. “Imperialism and Motherhood.” An Introduction to Women and Gender Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. 2nd ed. Eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. 60-6.
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
September 15                         
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Mobilities and Citizenship


Key Concepts: whiteness, property relations, racial privilege and embodiment, violence and the gaze, asylum and immigration, transnational mobilities and queer citizenship

Cultural Productions: Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez’s Tracing Stories from the Margins and Asilo Queer (short films); Hasam Elahi’s “Tracking Transience” project (digital surveillance project)

September 16                         
  • Randazzo, Timothy J. “Social and Legal Barriers: Sexual Orientation and Asylum in the United States.” Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 30-60.
September 21                         
  • Puar, Jasbir. “Data Bodies” excerpt. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 151-65.
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
September 22                         
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Imperial Bodies and Visual Culture

Key Concepts: Violence and the gaze, racialized visuality, state violence, torture, the spectacle of violence, U.S. imperialism; digital technologies

Cultural Productions: Standard Operating Procedure. Dir. Errol Morris, 2008 (film—on reserve at Hillman Library); Ken Gonzalez-Day’s Erased Lynching and Hang Trees exhibits (photographs)

September 23             
  • Puar, Jasbir K. “On Torture: Abu Ghraib.” Radical History Review 93 (2005): 13-38.
September 28                         
  • Butler, Judith. “Torture, Sexual Politics, and the Ethics of Photography.” From “Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib” panel at Stanford University. (audio recording of presentation)
  • Carby, Hazel. “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture.” On Open Democracy. 10 November 2004. <http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-abu_ghraib/article_2149.jsp>  
September 30                        
  • Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib.” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 21-44.  
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
October 1                    
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Disability and Bodies out of Bounds

Key Concepts: social construction of disability, social model v. medical model, excess and the historical production of disability, queer disability studies, myth of photographic truth, metaphors we live by, neoliberalism and homonormativity

Cultural Production: Axis Dance Company performances (dance performances)

October 5                    
  • McRuer, Robert, and Abby L. Wilkerson. “Introduction to Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (2003): 233-55.                 
October 7                    
  • Stacey, Jackie. “Visions.” Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. New York: Routledge, 1997. 137-76.
  •  DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
October 8                    
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Performing the Body

Key Concepts: blackness and U.S. national imaginary, social death, presence of history, collective resistance, nation as imagined community, racialized visualities, corporeal fetish, critically queer melancholia

Cultural Production: Bill T. Jones’s Fondly Do We Hope, Feverently Do We Pray (dance performance); Bill T. Jones’s Untitled (dance performance)

October 12                  
  • Holland, Sharon P. “Death and the Nation’s Subjects.” Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 13-40.
October 14                  
  • Gere, David. “T-Shirts and Holograms: Corporeal Fetishes in AIDS Choreography, c. 1989.” Theatre Journal 54.1 (2002): 45-62. 
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
October 15                  
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Fashion, Imperialism, and the Post/Colonial Body

Key Concepts: Chicana feminism and the body, racialized sexuality, social body, politics of clothing, neoliberalism and neocolonialism, postcoloniality, fashion and imperialism

Cultural Production: Art works by Amalia Mesa-Bains, Yriena D. Cervántez, and Diane Gamboa (in class)

October 19
  • Pérez, Laura E. “Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body in Contemporary Chicana Art.” Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 30-63.
October 21
  • Nguyen, Mimi Thi, and Minh-ha T. Pham. Selections from Threadbared 
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm) 
October 22
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Transgender Photography and Critiques of the Medical Gaze

Key Concepts: photography and modernity, transfeminism, referent, signifier, signified, trans studies and women’s studies, gendered gaze, figuration

Cultural Production: Photographs from Lily Rodríguez’s Mud and Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy

October 26                  
  • Salamon, Gayle. “Transfeminism and the Future of Gender.” Women’s Studies on the Edge. Ed. Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 115-36.
  • DUE: Research Proposal & Bibliography
October 28                 
  • Prosser, Jay. “My Second Skin.” Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 163-81. 
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
October 29                  
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Body Traffic—Organ Transplantation

Key Concepts: transnational traffic in human organs, biopolitics and the invention of “life itself,” alterity and subjectivity, politics of medicine, law and the body

Cultural Production: 21 Grams. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003 (film—on reserve at Hillman Library)

November 2                
  • Sharp, Lesley A. “Introduction: Strange Harvest.” Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 1-41.
November 4                
  • Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Commodity Fetishism in Organ Trafficking.” Body and Society 7.2/3 (2001): 31-62.
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm) 
November 5                
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

The Reproductive Body


Key Concepts: role of visual imagining in abortion politics, critiques of reproductive futurity, role of reproductive body in immigration and racialization practices, defining “life,” power and the gaze, feminist critiques of reproductive discourses, medicalization of pregnancy

Cultural Production: Making Visible Embryos Project (online exhibit)

November 9               
  • Stabile, Carol. “Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance.” The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. Eds. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley. New York: NYU Press, 1998. 171-97.
November 11             
  • VETERAN’S DAY—NO CLASS!
November 16              
  • Hartouni, Valerie. “Fetal Exposures: Abortion Politics and the Optics of Allusion.” The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. Eds. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley. New York: NYU Press, 1998. 198-216.  
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
November 17              
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

Freak Shows—Past and Present

Key Concepts: social construction of freakery, social v. medical model of disability, spectacle, display of colonized and disabled bodies, heteronormativity and the normative body

Cultural Production:  Mütter Museum website; Mütter Museum: Historic Medical Photographs (book—on reserve at Hillman Library)

November 18              
  • Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 1-19.
November 23             
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)       

November 29              
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)

The Transparent Body: Spectacle and the Posthuman

Key Concepts: Transparency and the visible body, imaging technologies, racialization in the absence of skin, cultural history of anatomy, medicine’s visual culture as entertainment

Cultural Production: Gunther von Hagens’s Bodyworlds (art installation);
Premier Exhibitions: Bodies…the Exhibition (art installation); The Visible Human Project (digital anatomy atlas)
           
November 30             
  • Kuppers, Petra. “Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 123-56.
December 2                
  • Hsu, Hsuan L., and Martha Lincoln. “Biopower, Bodies…the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health.” Discourse 29.1 (2007): 15-34.
December 7               
  • Cartwright, Lisa. “A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project.” The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. Eds. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley. New York: NYU Press, 1998. 21-43.
  • DUE: Blog Entry (9 pm)
December 8               
  • DUE: 2 Blog Comments (9 pm)
December 9                
  • Course wrap-up and evaluations 
  • DUE: Research Paper
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