Reading Bodies

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Understandings of the body have profound implications for how we live and work as gendered, sexed, and raced subjects. This unit investigates the way bodies have been 'read' over time and place, through medical, scientific, legal, literary and philosophical discourses, paying particular attention to the sexed body and the future of embodiment. It investigates the way bodies are constructed through narrative tropes or social conventions and also considers the role of the body in reading or interpreting, which are themselves embodied activities. Examples of texts explored include poems, dance, film, short stories, performance art, comic strips, stand-up comedy and art activism; and the theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, drawing from literary theory, sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, and the medical humanities. From the werewolf to the cyborg; fairytales to science fiction; ecofeminism to steampunk: this unit tells the story of how embodiment has been thought, shaped and lived, and considers what this may mean for the future of embodied life. It makes for an absorbing broadening unit for anyone with a body.