Syllabus
* Mandatory:
PORTER, R.: “History of the Body Reconsidered,” In: BURKE, P. New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge. 2001, pp 233-60.
GARLAND THOMSON, R.: "From Wonder to Error. A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity", In: THOMSON, R. G. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: NYU Press, 1996.
BOURKE, J.: “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39,” In: Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 35,Issue 1. 2000. pp 57-69.
* Recommended:
FOUCAULT, M.: Discipline and Punish: the birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
GILMAN, S.: “Marks of Honour and Dishonour,” In: Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 119-156.
SCHIEBINGER, L.: “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” Representations Vol. 14, Issue 1 1986. pp 42-82.
SCHWEIK, S. M. The Ugly Laws: Disability In Public. New York: NYU Press. 2010.
STOLER. A. L.: Carnal Knowledge And Imperial Power: Race And The Intimate In Colonial Rule. Updated ed. with a new preface. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010.
Annotation
The goal of this seminar is to introduce different approaches to the issue of the body that are being debated in the contemporary social sciences and historiography. Hence, students will have the chance to get familiar with various fields of research, including the history of science, medicine, and technology, gender history, studies of race and racism, sexuality and disability. The scope of the seminar is transnational and transhistorical, offering an insight into different historical periods as well as different regions of Europe, from Medieval France to the 20th-century Czechoslovakia. Within this wide frame, we will address various issues such as body symbolism, body politics, and politics of embodied difference, sexuality, and the question of ab/normality and the history of beauty ideals. The aim of the seminar is to offer basic orientation in the current history of embodiment and also to develop and refine reading and discussion skills of all participants. Weekly Schedule:
1) Historiography of body and embodiment
2) Body symbolism and political order in Medieval Europe
3) Natural philosophy, science, and transformations of gender order in Early-Modern Europe
4) Docile bodies
5) History of the Normal in Modernity
6) Freak bodies
7) Normalizing bodies through 19th-century plastic surgery
8) Embodiment and Appearance in the public
9) Colonized bodies and normal sex
10) Bodies, minds and traumatic disorders of war
11) Normalization of bodies and political order in socialist Czechoslovakia
12) Productive socialist/capitalist body
13) Closing discussion and examination