The Body Politics of Gender
Political Science 301
Winter 2023
Prof: Noga Rotem
T, Th, 1:30-3:20, Smith Hall 105
Office hours: Thursdays, 11:00 am- 1:00 pm, or by appointment, at 125 GWN
Course Description:
Are our bodies political?
The grounded materiality of bodies (they live and die; eat and sleep; feel pleasure and pain) suggests that the body is simply natural, not constructed or made. The intimacy with which we experience our bodies suggests that the body is private, not public.
Yet, over the last few decades feminist and queer thinkers compellingly argued that our bodies are neither private, nor exactly natural. Instead, they explored the body as a site of political construction, regulation, violence, and correction – in short, a site where power operates, but also as a site of resistance, creativity, and political experimentation.
This class will explore the politics of the body in three main units: Unit One: “Becoming, Experiencing,” is the main unit of this class and will explore two main questions: (1) how is the gendered body produced and sustained? (how does one “become" a gendered subject - as Simone de Beauvoir puts it), and, (2) What does it feel like to live inside a gendered body? We will examine two embodied gendered experiences in particular: pregnancy/abortion, and housework, through film (Happening, Housekeeping), and through the works of feminist thinkers Simone de Beauvoir, Lori Marso, and Iris Marion Young.
Unit Two: “Policing, Eliminating” will look at the raced and gendered body as a site of correction, coercion, and violence through two contemporary works by Gayle Salamon and Françoise Vergès which study two case studies: the murder of the 15 years old Latisha King in Oxnard, California, by a classmate who interpreted transgender expression as an aggressive assault, and the forceful termination of pregnancies of poor women of color in the (post)colonial French island of Reunion by French doctors.
Unit Three: “Passing, Resisting,” explores embodied tactics of resistance, solidarity/sorority, and world-building in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, and Lori Marso’s “Perverse Protest.”
This class is a W-course and will include in-class informal writing exercises as well as two graded writing assignments.
Required Texts
|
1 |
Iris Marion Young |
On Female Body Experience:” Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays |
2005 |
Oxford |
|
2 |
Judith Butler |
Bodies that Matter |
1993 (2011) |
Routledge |
|
3 |
Gayle Salamon |
The Life and Death of Latisha King |
2018 |
NYU Press |
|
4 |
Nella Larsen |
Passing |
2021 |
Signet Classics |
Requirements and evaluation:
Grade breakup:
Portfolio: 3 reflection posts (3 points each) +2 in-class writing exercises (8 points each), to be submitted in full by March 11, 11:59 pm (25 points)
Participation: (5 points)
Midterm essay (1500 words): assigned January 21; due Feb 4, at 11:59 pm (35 points)
Final essay (1500 words) OR Create and record an original podcast episode (10 minutes or less): assigned Feb 26; due March 14 (35 points)
REVISED SCHEDULE (starting Feb 23rd):
Th, Feb 23: Read: Nella Larsen’s Passing (you may skip chapters 1 and 3 of part II: Re-Encounter)
Optional: Watch Rebecca Hall’s Passing (2021) on your private Netflix account (or a friend’s).
Week 9:
T, Feb 28: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge”
Th, March 2: Lori Marso, Politics with Beauvoir, “Perverse Protests From Chantal Ackerman to Lars Von Trier”*
Week 10:
T, March 7: Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner”*