ANTH 539 - The Body

Credits: Variable

Emphasizes anthropological and feminist scholarship on “the body” that has worked to denaturalize the body by interrogating how bodies are produced as socially meaningful, how bodies are “read,” and in what embodiment consists. Course readings use the body to examine: social theories of identity and difference and processes of subjectification, including shifts in their formation within conditions of post/modernity, postcoloniality and late capitalism; current approaches to gender and sexedness, sexuality and heteronormativity, racialization and racisms, and class; large-scale processes interpolated through specific bodies, such as colonialism, nationalism and neoliberalism and, more broadly, structures of inequality and the operations of power; cultural differences in understandings of the body and enactments of embodiment, helping us to explore comparative questions about materiality and performativity and about bodies as cultural artifacts. Occasional.