The Body Politics of Gender
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 experiences in particular: pregnancy/abortion, and housework, through film (Happening, Housekeeping), and through the works of feminist thinkers Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young.
Unit Two: “Policing & Confining” 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 look at 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, Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking, and the recent Pelicot trial in France.