Syllabus
1. Embodiment and disidentification
2. Body performativity
3. Somatechnics, body assemblages, body-environments
4. Affect and the sociality of pain
5. Biopolitics and slow death
6. Chemical infrastructures and the politics of breathing
7. Eating bodies
8. Bodily transformations
9. Sounds and sentiment: Sighing, laughing, crying
10. Dying and hospice-tality
Annotation
This course introduces students to interdisciplinary social scientific scholarship of bodies, affect and society. We explore how bodily materiality is shaped by societal norms and practices and is active and indispensable for modes of disidentification, refusal and acting otherwise.
The course will examine modalities of bio- and necropolitics and focus on alternative approaches to a pervasive body-mind divide through examining the mutual constitution of reason and emotion, body and society, flesh and signification. How are bodies sexed, gendered and racialised? What are methods to research and represent bodies and affects, including what might be unavailable to verbalisation? Inspired by the method of memory work, students will also experiment with writing from the body.