Sylabus
1. Rage: The Performativity of the Body
2. Affected and Affective Bodies
3. Embodied Writing - Écriture féminine
4. Flesh and Discourse
5. Trans* Sex
6. Bodily Gestures and Utopia
7. Listening to Images
8. Necropolitics: Body Capacity and Debility
9. Reverberations of Sound
10. Review and Final Papers Compulsory literature: AHMED, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Chapter: “Feminist Attachments”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004. ISBN 978-1138805033. BUTLER, Judith. Bodies that Matter. “Introduction.” New York: Routledge,
1993. ISBN 978-0-415-61015-5. HAYWARD, Eva. "More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial flesh and Transspeciated Selves," Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (3/4). MUNOZ, Jose Esteban (2007) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Chapter: “A Jete through the Window”. New York: NYU Press. ISBN: 978-1479874569. Elective literature: CIXOUS, Helene "The Laugh of the Medusa", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1976 GUNARATNAM, Yasmin. Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care. Chapter: “Music”. London: Bloomsbury,
2015. ISBN 978-1474238267. MANNING, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Chapter: “In the Act: The Shape of Precarity”, Durham, Duke University,
2016. ISBN: 978-0822361213 PRECIADO, Beatrix. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Politics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Chapter: “Becoming T”. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY,
2013. ISBN 978-1558618374.
Anotace
Anotace
This course introduces students to the feminist scholarship on the body, embodiment and the senses. We explore the place of the body in gender theory and activism and address the questions: How do bodies get sexed, gendered and racialised? What is the importance of biological and environmental knowledges for feminist scholarship of the body? What methods and frameworks are used to understand the agency of bodily materiality and its relations to cultural discourses and meanings? How do we evaluate bodily transformations (e.g. modifications through surgery) and ‘bodily integrity’ if bodies are always relationally constituted and in flux? How is writing and conceptualising an embodied activity, and how can we attune our senses in research exercises? Throughout the course we will reflect on the affects and orientations produced by reading – and hopefully walking together – and discussing key texts of established and emerging feminist scholars. The course introduces students to walking methodologies and creative writing in the context of Covid-19 pandemic.
Depending on epidemiological situation in Prague we will combine class sessions held on MS teams online – including interactive lecture and student-led discussions using breakout rooms – and ‘walkshops’ in the area of the university in Troja, where we will have group discussions while walking in small groups with masks through particular terrain (see more on methods below).