Authoring Gender and the Body

Across time, place, and discipline, the body has been a contested site for defining ideas about complex experiences of gender and sexuality. This course asks: how have a diverse array of authors used "body-writing" to intervene in these debates? We will engage multiple disciplines of body-writing, addressing theory, memoir, autobiography, political manifesto, and scientific discourse; reading will include some foundational gender studies texts while driving toward hyper-contemporary, intersectional feminist, gender, and sexuality discourses. As we consider a broad variety of strategies and polemics in body-writing, we will interrogate themes such as power, class, race, pleasure, trauma, disability, reproduction, beauty, transition, sustainability, technology, and intersectionality. How does body-writing connect the literary, scientific, political, personal, and metaphysical concerns of multiple liberation movements? How does embodied writing challenge the fact of mortality? How has body-writing contributed to interdisciplinary feminist, gender, and sexuality knowledge production? Crucially and centrally, assigned reading will provoke our own embodied writing as we conduct our own weekly experiments in body-writing. Emerging from these experiments, each student will conduct a large-scale research project focused on an author, genre, and/or theme of their choice.