Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0177 - Body in Contemp Philosophy

This course examines contemporary philosophical questions about the body: What is the significance of the corporeal interdependence we sustain with others and the world? What part does this play in creating bodily orientations, boundaries, and distances? How do discipline, technology, and commerce shape bodies? In what ways is the body linked to language and other aesthetic idioms? To affect and materiality? How does the body signify intersecting forms of difference, such as those of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And how do these differences signify the body? What is at stake in distinctions between human and nonhuman bodies? How do queer and trans subjectivities speak to phantasmatic registers of materiality and vice versa? Why do some senses appear to sustain closer corporeal affiliations than others? What conceptions of power, hierarchy, and sociality do figurations of the body imply? Readings by Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Fanon, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Alcoff, Weiss, Korsmeyer, Ahmed, Salamon, and others.

Culture, Humanities, and Languages Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives Independent Work Students are expected to spend 7-8 additional hours per week in work and preparation outside of class time.