What makes a body political?
Overview
How are fairy tales, plastic dolls, family traditions, dance, and sex…political? In this constellation, we will explore how everyday items, widespread practices, and patterns in our society that seem inevitable — “just how things are” — are in fact tightly tied to power, history, and political choices. The constellation will ask: How do our individual bodies affect how we experience politics? How are things ranging from intimate choices to popular culture tied to political ideologies? What does it mean for ideas and identities to be “socially constructed”? Through American-centric and global perspectives, history and social science, law, film, art, literature, writing, and embodied practices, we’ll learn why human bodies are political; how in combination, they make up “political bodies”; and how these understandings can help us develop tools to shape the world.
You will take three courses from the options listed below. In the fall, you will take one of the WRITING 120CN courses and one of the other available courses. In the spring, you will choose one of the available courses.
Courses
ETHICS 196CNS: Imagination for Liberation: Creative Strategies for Social Movement (CE)
Brooks Emanuel, Executive in Residence, Kenan Institute for Ethics
How does change happen? This course explores histories of systems of oppression in the United States; social movements and the strategies they use to enact change, including not only legal and legislative tactics but also artistic interventions; and how embodied practices can open up new ways of knowing that allow us to imagine radically different futures. Students will integrate and field test these different approaches on issues that align with their interests.
Cross-lists: PUBPOL 194CNS/ DANCE 196CNS
GSF 120CNS: Fairy Tales and Girlhood (TBD)
Kimberly Lamm, Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
In the minds of many, the figure of the girl seems far away from politics. This distance is likely because the girl has deep associations with what is silly and insignificant, and of course politics are serious, consequential stuff. Fairy tales, however, tell a different story. These mythic narratives, built up from oral traditions and full of magical transformations, show us that girls are culturally significant. They occupy the boundaries between life and death, body and mind, order and chaos, fantasy and reality, human and animal. At the same time, traditional fairy tales often reinforce the idea that girls should be obedient, chaste, passive, and quiet--happily serving as symbols for others. Our focus in “Fairy Tales and Girlhood” will be on the work of writers, artists, filmmakers and scholars who have been revising fairy tales since the 1970s to draw out their liberatory potential and have used their familiar themes to reveal and negotiate how girls (and their bodies) can appear in the world as political beings with their own stories, voices, desires, and aspirations. Together we’ll read and watch fairy tales from around the world in a variety of mediums (literature, art, and film), and we’ll pay particular attention to fairy tales that expand our perceptions of girlhood beyond the categories with which it is typically associated such as whiteness and heterosexuality.
Cross-lists: ENGLISH 120CN, LIT 120CN, AAHVS 120CN
ROMST 167CNS: Unruly Bodies: Narratives of Dissent (HI)
Eric Disbro, Assistant Professor, Romance Studies
Through literature, film, and contemporary art, students will examine global bodies as narratives of unruliness. What happens to bodies on the margins? How does policy account for bodies that defy borders and definitions? Which bodies offer dissenting expressions against institutions of power? Global case studies include: clandestine migration, border enforcement, food insecurity/malnutrition/obesity, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, nuclear testing and its environmental consequences, activist art, Indigenous land sovereignty, mental health awareness, the #BlackLivesMatter and the #MeToo movements, and transgender bodily autonomy. All case studies will be available, read, and discussed in English translation. No knowledge of French is required.
SOCIOL 118CN: Sex, Gender, and Society (IJ)
Mary Hovsepian, Senior Lecturer, Sociology
This course explores how society prescribes gendered positions to people along the biological sex continuum and how gendered assumptions embed inequalities in social institutions. The course examines how gender interacts with race, ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality to influence individual lives, interpersonal interactions, and social structures. Nature and acquisition of sex roles. Cross-cultural variations. Developing nature of sex roles in American society.
POLISCI 1XXCN: Politics in the Family (TBD)
Allison Anoll, Associate Professor, Political Science
In defending democracy, John Locke famously argued that there are two spheres of governance: the public sphere where citizens have the right to self-govern and the private sphere where the family is protected from politics. But more modern political science teaches us that actually, the family is a very political place. In this course, we consider how laws surrounding marriage, reproduction, immigration, and taxes have shaped the American family through history. Further, we’ll look at how the family shapes politics by socializing children and teaching them what it means to be a citizen. It turns out, as we’ll see, that the private sphere is both shaped by politics and shapes the political world.
DANCE 191CNS: Politics in Movement: Embodiment, Systems, and the Imagination of Relational Possibilities (CE)
Michael Klien, Professor of the Practice, Dance
What if politics is not just 'out there' in institutions and laws but something we live, embody, and shape in every moment? This course invites you to rethink politics as a creative, relational force—a constantly shifting system of human ordering that is contingent, artificial, and open to reinvention. Combining embodied practices, speculative thought, and theory, this seminar explores how socio-political ideologies inscribe themselves in our bodies and behaviors. Through play, experimentation, and reflection, we will design and deconstruct systems, examine individual agency within larger frameworks, and imagine new relational possibilities. Accessible to all, the course welcomes participants willing to engage in embodied inquiry.
ENGLISH 170CN: Political Theater (HI)
Corina Stan, Associate Professor, English
This course examines political plays set in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in various international countries across the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through close engagement with political plays by Aristophanes, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, Fugard, Churchill, Dorfman, Aktar, Wolfe, and others, as well as with relevant historical sources and films, students learn about the world-shaping events of the past century and a half, reflect on competing conceptions of politics and community, justice, power, imperialism, democracy, dictatorship, and other topics, and the ways playwrights have dramatized these events on stage, engaging audiences in collective reflection and aesthetic enjoyment, and often compelling to political action.
HISTORY 181CNS: Sex, Bodies, and Power (IJ)
Peter Sigal, Professor, History
In our world, bodies and sexual acts have become linked to political power in terms of pleasure, reproduction, identity, and even basic bodily functions such as urination and defecation. How has something so basic as one's body become so closely associated with power? Sex, Bodies, and Power engages in an interdisciplinary examination of written and visual texts to examine the way bodies have been linked to sex and power. How do we understand our own bodies? How do we develop sexual fantasies, and how are those fantasies regulated by the state and other actors and institutions? Do bodies and sex become regulated differently depending on race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender? How does this change in different times and places? How is all of this altered by global pandemics, anti-racist movements, reproductive justice, and queer embodiment? What does it mean to engage in a historical analysis of these questions?
CLST 1XXCN: Ancient Athenian Law (TBD)
Josh Sosin, Associate Professor, Classical Studies
Introduction to ancient Athenian law. Read and discuss court speeches from real trials held 2000+ years ago. Topics range from homicide to commerce and banking, citizenship to assault, slavery to inheritance, religion to sexuality, political amnesty to judicial torture. Explore, through in-class discussion, theory and practice of law, aspects of social, economic, political, and cultural history visible through law in action, relationship between Athenian law and Athenian democracy.
WRITING 120CN: It’s a Barbie World
Leslie Maxwell, Lecturing Fellow, Thompson Writing Program
In many countries and cultures around the world, Barbie, at 66 years old, is a childhood toy, a plaything. Yet Barbie is, of course, more than that. In many ways, Barbie is a totem for our cultural and individual identities. How Barbie has shaped our collective and individual memories? And how have our collective and individual memories shaped Barbie? How does that affect our view of childhood, both our own and that of others? What are the complexities that Barbie (the toy, the word, the idea) brings up? And how has Barbie gone from toy to pop culture icon (or both at the same time)? In this class, we will explore these questions through the framework of a writing class, practicing skills of close reading, critical reading and thinking, doing research, using sources responsibly, and using sources as one piece of a larger whole.
Writing 120: Writing Portrayed in Media
Sharieka Botex, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Writing Studies, Thompson Writing Program
How do popular media and scholarly texts portray writing, reading, communication, and other literacy practices of various professions and academic disciplines? In what ways do scholars across disciplines discuss their writing and research on television shows, music, podcasts, and other forms of entertainment and media? When and how do media portrayals of writing, reading, and communication in various fields differ from and/or compare to lived experiences among people in these professions and scholarly fields? These are among some of the questions this class will provide you with an opportunity to explore. In this class, we will explore scholarly texts and popular entertainment media to learn how people discuss the writing, reading, and communication they do in their professional fields. This course requires students to review television shows, podcasts, music, and scholarship that shed light on academic and professional paths to better familiarize themselves with the ways writing, reading and communication transpire in their future majors or careers.
In this class, students are required to complete three main writing projects[1]: 1. Contemporary Issues Journals, in which they respond to assigned writing prompts, explore topics of interest and engage with scholarly texts and popular media sources. 2. An 8-10 page double-spaced research paper, which explores intersections between media and scholarly sources related to a profession or academic discipline of your choosing and a topic you are interested in writing about. 3. A media pitch in which you propose an idea about media content that you believe should be created to inform people about the writing, reading, and communication in your intended major or future career and persuade them about why literacy practices are valuable in the field. Through writing and revising your assignments and participating in peer-review focused on the major writing assignments, you will develop an awareness of the literacy practices you may use in your future professional and academic endeavors and learn about similarities and differences in writing, reading and communication in different majors and professions.