The Black Body

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.