Gender and the Body - YMGS627

• Title: Gender and the Body
• Guaranteed by: Programme Gender Studies (24-KGS)
• Faculty: Faculty of Humanities
• Actual: from 2023
• Semester: winter
• E-Credits: 6
• Examination process: winter s.:written
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:2/1, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (25)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D.
• Class: Courses available to incoming students
• Co-requisite : {The course under this code is intended for MA level students. BA students interested in this course need to enrol the BA level code that begins with "YB".}
• Incompatibility : YBAJ192, YMGS635
• Is incompatible with: YMGS635, YBAJ192

Annotation

Last update: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D. (25.09.2020)

Anotace This course introduces students to the feminist scholarship on the body, embodiment and the senses. We explore the place of the body in gender theory and activism and address the questions: How do bodies get sexed, gendered and racialised? What is the importance of biological and environmental knowledges for feminist scholarship of the body? What methods and frameworks are used to understand the agency of bodily materiality and its relations to cultural discourses and meanings? How do we evaluate bodily transformations (e.g. modifications through surgery) and ‘bodily integrity’ if bodies are always relationally constituted and in flux? How is writing and conceptualising an embodied activity, and how can we attune our senses in research exercises? Throughout the course we will reflect on the affects and orientations produced by reading – and hopefully walking together – and discussing key texts of established and emerging feminist scholars. The course introduces students to walking methodologies and creative writing in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. Depending on epidemiological situation in Prague we will combine class sessions held on MS teams online – including interactive lecture and student-led discussions using breakout rooms – and ‘walkshops’ in the area of the university in Troja, where we will have group discussions while walking in small groups with masks through particular terrain (see more on methods below).

Aim of the course

Last update: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D. (20.09.2022)

1. to develop a critical appreciation of bodies as relational, active, open, material and discursive

2. to understand and apply different conceptual approaches to the gendered and gendering body (e.g. post-structuralist, phenomenological, new materialist)

3. to attune your bodily sensorium to smells, sounds, movements and fleeting gestures and what they tell us

4. to experiment with creative writing of the body and what affect can do  

6. to foster teamwork, collaboration and constructive criticism

Teaching methods

Last update: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D. (20.09.2022)

This course will  be divided between short introductions and a discussion of weekly required readings. Class discussions will be prepared by small groups of students who will meet online with the class teacher before class and will be responsible for this session.

You will two smaller writing task and a group presentation.

Syllabus

Last update: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D. (25.09.2020)

1. Rage: The Performativity of the Body 

2. Affected and Affective Bodies

3. Embodied Writing - Écriture féminine

4. Flesh and Discourse

5. Trans* Sex

6. Bodily Gestures and Utopia

7. Listening to Images

8. Necropolitics: Body Capacity and Debility

9. Reverberations of Sound

10. Review and Final Papers

 

Compulsory literature:
AHMED, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Chapter: “Feminist Attachments”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-1138805033.

BUTLER, Judith. Bodies that Matter. “Introduction.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ISBN 978-0-415-61015-5.

HAYWARD, Eva. "More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial flesh and Transspeciated Selves," Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (3/4).

MUNOZ, Jose Esteban (2007) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Chapter: “A Jete through the Window”. New York: NYU Press. ISBN: 978-1479874569.

 

Elective literature:
CIXOUS, Helene "The Laugh of the Medusa", Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1976

GUNARATNAM, Yasmin. Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care. Chapter: “Music”. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ISBN 978-1474238267.

MANNING, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Chapter: “In the Act: The Shape of Precarity”, Durham, Duke University, 2016. ISBN: 978-0822361213  

PRECIADO, Beatrix. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Politics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Chapter: “Becoming T”. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013. ISBN 978-1558618374.

Course completion requirements

Last update: Dagmar Lorenz - Meyer, M.A., Ph.D. (20.09.2022)

Assessment will be continuous and includes individual and group work through the semester. Instead of a final exam students will write a final paper, individually or in pairs.

Individual work:

Ø  Active participation in weekly class discussions: 25 %

Ø  Short concept paper (700 words): write about a concept from the course readings that you find interesting: where does it come from, how is it defined? Illustrate what the concepts allow us to sense and do. Due in week 8 10%

Ø  Creative writing paper/memory work (600 words): write in the third person about an autobiographical body experience, that we will anonymise and examine in small groups. Due in week 5: 10%

Group work (in small groups of 2-4 students)

Ø  Choose a session that you want to run with your peers: prepare a summary of the main course reading (500 words) and 3-4 questions for class discussion: 10%

Ø  Group Presentation on the creative writing and concepts: collective recompose one of the creative writing papers – analyse it from perspectives of the course (c 12-15 minutes) (in week 12 and 13): 10%

Ø  Final paper: analyse and expand the group presentation, or a course topic of your choice, drawing on further readings and at least two main readings (2500 words individually or 3500 words in pairs). Short abstracts are due by 4 January 2023, paper is due 26 January 2023: 35%