everything.study
WOME 4110

Special Topics

0.5 credits · Undergraduate

Winter 2021

Topics

  • entertainment industries observed across historical Europe and North America. In this course, we
  • postmortem and colonized bodies placed on display in natural history museums, famous ‘freak’
  • shows, and human zoos. By looking to the complex ways that sex, gender, disability, species
  • processes of sex, race, gender, species, and able-bodied normalization diverges and intersects
  • analyze how these scholars have actively reclaimed the body as extraordinary and remarkable
  • through contemporary art, media, photography, installation, and performance
  • Lakehead University
  • Final Paper (12 pages): 20%
  • Ø To develop an understanding of the principles, ethics, and practices of critical disability
  • and race studies as they relate to a range of interdisciplinary topics
  • interconnectedness between race, disability, gender, and sexuality (among many other
  • identifiable categories)
  • Ø Understand the relationship between knowledge production, social location, ideology
  • and structural inequality
  • Ø Articulate how social locations such as race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality
  • inform feminist research
  • Ø Recognize the diversity of feminist and anti-oppressive approaches to interdisciplinary
  • research and practice

Readings

  • Required: Email Note: Ø
  • Recommended: - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson – “Disability Studies: A Field Emerged”
  • Recommended: - Subini A. Annamma, David Connor and Beth Ferri – “Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/ability”
  • Recommended: - Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin – “Disability”
  • Recommended: - Fiona Kumari Campbell – “Ability”
  • Recommended: - Victoria Ann Lewis – “Crip”
  • Recommended: W2/Jan 19: The Extraordinary Body: Theory of Matter
  • Required: - Judith Butler – excerpts from Bodies that Matter
  • Required: - Zine Magubane – “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’”
  • Required: - Jane Nicholas – “A Debt to the Dead? Ethics, Photography, History and the Study of Freakery”
  • Required: - Ellen Samuels – “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability”
  • Required: - Abby Wilkerson – “Embodiment”
  • Required: - Julia Miele Rodas – “Identity”
  • Required: W3/Jan 26: The Material Body: Constructing ‘Teratology’
  • Required: - Anthony Anemone – “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century”
  • Required: - Nadja Durbach – “Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Re-Examining ‘the Elephant Man’”
  • Required: - Elizabeth Grosz – “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit”
  • Required: - Margrit Shildrick – “Monsters, Marvels, and Metaphysics: Beyond the Powers of Horrors”
  • Recommended: - Lennard Davis – “Constructing Normalcy”
  • Recommended: - Jane Nicholas and Lori Chambers – “In Search of Monkey Girl”
  • Recommended: - Helen Deutsch – “Deformity”
  • Recommended: - Susan Burch and Kim E. Nielsen – “History”
  • Recommended: W4/Feb 2: The ‘Order’ of Things
  • Required: - Maneesha Deckha – “The Salience of Species Difference for Feminist Theory”
  • Required: - Patricia Fara – excerpts from Sex, Botany and Empire
  • Required: - Londa Schiebinger – “Feminist History of Colonial Science”
  • Required: - Londa Schiebinger – “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy”
  • Required: Lakehead University 6
  • Required: - Rachel Herrick – “Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies” (2013)
  • Required: - Kathleen LeBesco – “Fat”
  • Required: - Tanya Titchkosky – “Normal”
  • Required: - Christopher Gabbard – “Human”
  • Required: W5/Feb 9: Gender and Sexual Expression on Display
  • Required: - Sears Clare – “Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth Century San Francisco”
  • Required: - Channing Gerard Joseph – “The First Drag Queen”
  • Required: - Siobhan B. Somerville – “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body”
  • Required: - Elizabeth Stephens – “The Queer Space of the Freak Show”
  • Recommended: - Alison Kafer – “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-Bodiedness”
  • Recommended: - Allyson Mitchell – Ladies Sasquatch (2006-2010)
  • Recommended: - Kim Q. Hall – “Gender”
  • Recommended: - Margrit Shildrick – “Sex”
  • Recommended: - Robert McRuer – “Sexuality”
  • Recommended: - Tim Dean – “Queer”
  • Recommended: W6/Feb 16: Reading Week
  • Recommended: Relax and rest up J
  • Recommended: W7/Feb 23: Madness, Hysteria, and Cognitive Disability
  • Required: - Elizabeth J. Donaldson – “Revisiting the Corpus of the Madwoman: Further Notes Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory”
  • Required: - Robert Bogdan – “The Exhibition of People We Now Call Retarded”
  • Required: - Heather Meek – “Of Wandering Wombs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason”
  • Required: - Elizabeth Stephens and Peter Cryle – “Eugenics and the Normal Body: The Role of Visual Images and Intelligence Testing in Framing the Treatment of People with Disabilities in the Early Twentieth Century”
  • Recommended: - Licia Carlson – “Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation”
  • Recommended: Lakehead University 7
  • Recommended: - Brad Isaacs - The Map of the Empire (2016); Tell Me About Your Mother series (2014)
  • Recommended: - Sander L. Gilman – “Madness”
  • Recommended: - Sayantani DasGupta – “Medicalization”
  • Recommended: - Licia Carlson – “Institutions”
  • Recommended: W8/Mar 2: Constructing Race and Body Ownership
  • Required: - Warren Cariou – “The Exhibited Body: The Nineteenth-Century Human Zoo”
  • Required: - Anne Fausto-Sterling – “Gender, Race, and Nation: Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817”
  • Required: - Coco Fusco – “The Other History of Intercultural Performance”
  • Required: - Cynthia Wu – “Labor and Ownership in the American South”
  • Required: - Benjamin Reiss – “P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth, and Antebellum Spectacles of Race”
  • Recommended: - Sami Schalk – “Introduction,” Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender
  • Recommended: - Brett Bailey – Exhibit B (2010-2016)
  • Recommended: - Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña – Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992
  • Recommended: - Lennard J. Davis – “Diversity”
  • Recommended: - Allison Carey – “Citizenship”
  • Recommended: - Nirmala Erevelles – “Race”
  • Recommended: W9/Mar 9: ‘Enfreakment’ and the Historical Sideshow
  • Required: - Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire – “Human Zoos: The Greatest Exotic Shows in the West”
  • Required: - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson – “The Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body”; “Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana”
  • Required: - Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau – “Introduction,” Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’
  • Required: - Jane Nicholas – “Monsters and Freaks: Exhibitionary Culture and the Order of Things”
  • Recommended: - Eli Clare – “Freaks and Queers”
  • Recommended: - Mothmeister – Revelations Behind the Mask | Mythological Entropy
  • Recommended: - Mothmeister – miscellaneous examples
  • Recommended: Lakehead University 8
  • Recommended: - Leonard Cassuto – “Freak”
  • Recommended: - Georgina Kleege – “Visuality”
  • Recommended: W10/Mar 16: Mermaids, ‘Missing Links,’ and the Dehumanization Process
  • Recommended: - Skye Anicca – “Cripping the Mermaid: Borderlands Approach to Feminist Disability Studies”
  • Recommended: - Beatrice Laurent – “Monster or Missing Link? The Mermaid and the Victorian Imagination”
  • Recommended: - Cynthia Barounis – “Special Affects: Mermaids, Prosthetics, and the Disabling of Feminine Futurity”
  • Recommended: - Nigel Rothfels – “Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany”
  • Recommended: - Miranda Niittynen – “Interspecies Blendings and Resurrections: Material Histories of Disability and Race in Taxidermy Art”
  • Recommended: - Michael Bérubé – “Representation”
  • Recommended: - Ani B. Satz – “Vulnerability”
  • Recommended: W11/Mar 23: Modern Eugenics and Taxidermic Bodies
  • Required: - Donna Haraway – “Teddy Bear Patriarchy”
  • Required: - Anna Stubblefield – “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization”
  • Required: - Fatimah Tobing-Rony – “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography”
  • Required: - Pauline Wakeham – “Tracking the Taxidermic”
  • Required: - Rebecca Garden – “Ethics”
  • Required: - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson – “Eugenics”
  • Required: - Janet Lyon – “Modernity”
  • Required: W12/Mar 30: Unburiable Bodies and Repatriated Human Rights
  • Required: - Neil Parsons and Alinah Kelo Segobye – “Missing Persons and Stolen Bodies: The Repatriation”
  • Required: - Connie Rapoo – “‘Just Give us the Bones!’: Theatres of African Disaporic Returns”
  • Required: - Andrea Smith – “Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity”
  • Required: - Pauline Wakeham – “Repatriation’s Remainders”
  • Required: - Kent Monkman - The Rise and Fall of Civilization, 2016
  • Required: - Dana Claxton - Buffalo Bone China, 1997
  • Required: - Denise M. Nepveux – “Activism”
  • Required: - Lisa Cartwright – “Affect”
  • Required: Lakehead University 9
  • Required: - Kathryn Linn Geurts – “Senses”
  • Required: - Maya Sabatello – “Rights”
  • Required: W13/Apr 6: Disability, Illness, and the Narrative of ‘Cure’
  • Required: - Rachel Adams – “Choosing Disability, Visualizing Care”
  • Required: - Stella Bolaki – “Challenging Invisibility, Making Connections: Illness, Survival and Black Struggles in Audre Lorde’s Work”
  • Required: - Susan Sontag – excerpts from Illness as Metaphor
  • Required: - Jasbir Puar – excerpts from The Right to Maim
  • Required: - Pink Concussions
  • Required: - Wangechi Mutu – This You Call Civilization? and Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover’s Requiem
  • Required: (2006); Howl (2006); other miscellaneous artworks
  • Required: - Jill C. Anderson – “Accident”
  • Required: - G. Thomas Couser – “Illness”
  • Required: - Susannah B. Mintz – “Invisibility” Marth Stoddard Holmes – “Pain”
  • Required: - Gary L. Albrecht – “Rehabilitation”
  • Required: W14/Apr 13: Extraordinary Bodies in Art
  • Required: - Ann M. Fox and Joan Lipkin – “Res(crip)ting Feminist Theater through Disability Theater”
  • Required: - Cassandra Jackson – “Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Subject in Art of Carrie Mae Weems”
  • Required: - Disability History Exhibit
  • Required: - Viji Kuppan – “Crippin’ Blackness: Narratives of Disabled People of Colour from Slavery to Trump”
  • Required: - Sophia Smith Galer – “How Black Women were Whitewashed by Art”
  • Required: - Claire Cunningham – various performances and choreography
  • Required: - Carrie Mae Weems – Miscellaneous examples
  • Required: - Extraordinary Bodies, UK – “What Am I Worth?”
  • Required: - Kinetic Light
  • Required: - Michael Davidson – “Aesthetics”
  • Required: - Petra Kuppers – Performance
  • Required: - Ellen Samuels – Passing
  • Required: Lakehead University 10
Sources