Syllabus
a full syllabus will be provided in the first week of term.
Block I The Forces of Affect and Embodiment
Block II Flesh and Signification
Block III Affective Knowing through Touch, Sound and Smell
Block IV Debility, Slow Death, Hospitality
Compulsory literature:
KIRBY, Vicki. Judith Butler: Live Theory. Chapter: “Gender, Sexuality, Performance”. London: Continuum. ISBN: 978-0826462930.
LIVINGSTON, Julie. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Chapter: “Family Matter and Money Matters”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN: 978-0253346377.
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.
STRYKER, Susan. My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. Kvinder, Kon & Forskning 3-4, 2011 [1994].
Elective literature:
BERLANT, Lauren and STEWART, Kathleen. The Hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1478002888.
CAMPT, Tina. Listening to Images. Chapter: “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity”, 2017. ISBN: 978-0822362708.
HALBERSTAM, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1108-8
HARTMAN, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: WW Norton. ISBN: 978-0393357622.
Annotation
This course introduces students to feminist approaches to affective processes, embodiment and the senses that have gained increasing attention in gender studies. The course will examine conceptions of the interrelation of body and mind, flesh and signification, organism and environment. What insights into social life, dispossession, and bodily transformation including what is withdrawn and unavailable to verbalisation can be gained if we attune to sound, gestures, rhythm, ruptures and affective resonances? How are researcher-bodies involved in affective methodologies? What alternative histories and futures emerge in gestures of refusal, discarded photographs and sounds and movements? Case studies will focus on trans*bodies; black lives; debility; hospitality and slow death, and students will experiment with walking methodolgies and with producing a piece of embodied writing.
Note: The course methods are shaped by conditions of the 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.