Course Syllabus (Draft) Feminist Biopolitics and Cultural Practice Winter 2015, MA, 4 Credits Time and Place TBA
Hyaesin Yoon Email: [email protected] Office: Zrynyi 14, 510A Office Hours: TBA
What do memorial displays for those who died from AIDS tell us about public mourning as a political measure of (disavowed) sexuality? How does the performance of dancers with disabilities challenge the normative understanding of gendered and racialized desire/desirability? How do literature and film afford space for re-imagining the relationship between women and other female animals in the circuits of biotechnology? This course examines how the biopolitical operations of gender, sexuality, race, species, and disability im/materialize through various forms of cultural practice. In this course, we will enter the conversation between feminist and queer theories and the discourse of biopolitics concerning the relationship of life (and death) to the political. We will pay particular attention to the entwinement between the biological, technological, and cultural as an important constituent of biopolitics, as most dramatically shown in – but not limited to – the emergence of bioarts and biomedia. From this perspective, the course explores a number of sites of cultural practice including digital archive, exhibit, dance, tattoo, biometrics, prosthetics, and graphic medicine as topoi of feminist criticisms and creative interventions.
Learning Outcomes
• Students will familiarize themselves with the major concepts and arguments in biopolitical theories, and their connections to and implications for gender studies in particular and critical theories in general. • Students will better understand and be able to analyze some of the important ways in which biopolitical power relations substantiate and operate through cultural practices in the contemporary world. • Students will be able to experiment with transdisciplinary theories and methods in order to engage with various forms of cultural practice, such as digital archive, dance, cloning, and biometrics. • Students will improve their skills in analytical reading and writing, verbal discussion, and other forms of presentation.
Requirements
1. Attendance and Participation (10%): Please complete the reading and screening assignment each week, and be prepared for class discussion. Curiosity, humility, generosity, respect, and risk-taking are expected for our collective journey. Attendance is mandatory. Absences due to medical problems must be officially documented. Missing a class without an official document will negatively affect your grade, and missing more than three classes might result in failing the course.
2. Moodle Posts (40%): You are required to write four posts on the course website (each 500-600 words) about the readings and other materials under the corresponding weekly
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thread by the day before class. The website is a space for you to think about the texts, to articulate your questions, interpretations, and critiques, and to share them with other participants. A post is expected to demonstrate your analytic engagement with the texts – more than simple summaries or criticisms based on an already-assumed position of truth and/or justice. You are encouraged to read your colleagues’ posts before we meet. These posts won’t receive extensive written comments, but will be incorporated into class discussions.
3. Conference presentation (20%): You will give a presentation that is directly relevant to your upcoming term paper. You are welcome to present the work-in-progress that you are developing into the paper, but you may also present a media, art, or performance project that will be complemented by the paper. The point of the class conference is to have the opportunity to share your work and offer collective input into each other’s projects. We will schedule your presentations in advance for either week 8 or week 12, so that you can plan ahead.
4. Term Paper (30%): You will write a term paper (2000-2500 words) on a topic of your choice that is directly relevant to the theme of the course. The term paper is not a standard research paper, and should demonstrate conceptual, methodological, and epistemological engagement with the course materials and discussion. You may write the paper as part of a larger research project of yours, but you should nonetheless engage with course materials in a significant manner.
Course Policies and Logistics
1. Please arrive on time, and turn off or silence all cell phones before class begins (vibration- mode does not constitute turning off). I also have a no-laptop, no-tablet, no-recording policy during class discussions, so that we can fully engage with and pay attention to other participants. However, if you need a laptop (or any other device) for disability-related or other meaningful reasons, you’re welcome to use it; just let me know in advance.
2. Office Hours: I’d like everyone to visit my office hours at least once during the semester, but I welcome and encourage more visits. These meetings are to go over classroom discussions, assignments, and any other concerns or thoughts you might have related to the course. If you come up with an idea for your current or future research during the semester, it would be my pleasure to discuss it. Feel free to come in small groups as well as individually.
3. If you have any disability-related needs, please discuss them with me ASAP. Access needs can be shared with the class without shame. We, as a learning community, will try to support each other’s access needs.
Preliminary Course Schedule and Selected Texts
Week 1. Life, Power, and Biopolitics Course Introduction • Michel Foucault, Lecture 11 (17 March, 1976),‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College De France 1975-76 (New York: Picador, 2003). • SubRosa, art and performance pieces from http://www.cyberfeminism.net/.
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Week 2. Bare Life and the Informatics of Bodies • Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), selected chapters. • The Visible Human Project Online Gallery, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_gallery.html. • Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2000), selected chapters.
Week 2. Necropolitics and the Informatics • Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (1), 2003. • Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, and Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (4), 2007.
Week 4. Precarity of Life • Judith Butler, “Explanation and Exoneration,” “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” “Precarious Life,” in Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2006). • Jasbir Puar, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, et al., “Precarity Talk,” TDR: The Drama Review 56 (4), 2012. • Materials on the AIDS memorial display and performance TBA.
Week 5. The Politics and Aesthetics of Life Itself • Nicolas Rose, “Biopolitics in the Twenty-Frist Century,” in The Politics of Life Itself (London: Routledge, 2006). • Elizabeth Grosz, “Art and the Animal,” in Becoming Undone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). • Eduardo Kac, “Life Transformation – Art Mutation,” in Signs of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009)
Week 6. The Immunitary Paradigm • Roberto Esposito, “The Immunization Paradigm,” Diacritics 36 (2), 2006. • Corinne Mason Shoshana Magnet, “Surveillance Studies and Violence Against Women,” Surveillance and Society 10 (2), 2012. • Shoshana Magnet, “Of Trojan Horses and Terrorist Representations: Mom Bombs, Cross- Dressing Terrorists, and Other Queer Orientalisms,” Canadian Journal of Communication 39 (2), 2014.
Week 7. Flesh, Skin, and Affect • Alexander Weheliye, “Introduction: Now,” “Blackness: The Human,” “Bare Life: The Flesh,” “Law: Property,” “Deprivation: Pornotropes,” in Habeas Viscus (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). • Nikki Sullivan, “The Somatechnics of Bodily Inscription: Tattooing,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10 (3), 2009. • Mark B. N. Hansen, “Digitizing the Racialized Body and the Politics of Universal Address,” SubStance 33(2), 2004.
Week 8. Conference A
Group A Term Paper Due TBA
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Week 9. Art, Labor, and the Technology of Reproduction • W. J. T. Mitchell, “Vital Signs,” “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” in What Do Pictures Want (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). • Jackie Stacey, “Leading Across the In-Between: Transductive Cinema in Teknolust,” in The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). • Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “From Reproductive Work to Regenerative Labor,” Feminist Theory 11(1), 2010.
Week 10. Trans-Species Feminist Alliance • Donna Haraway, “FemaleMan©_Meets_OncomouseTM.Mice into Wormholes,” from Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncomouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997). • Charis Thompson Cussins, “Confessions of a Bioterrorist: Subject Position and Reproductive Technologies,” Playing Dolly (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1999). • Greta Gaard, “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” American Quarterly 65(3), 2013.
Week 11. Prosthetic Assemblages • Sins Invalid:Un Ashamed Claim to Beauty (film, 2013), in class screening. • Kelly Fritsch, “Intimate Assemblages,” Critical Disability Discourses 2 (2010). • Sarah Leavitt, Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), graphic novel, excerpts.
Week 12. Conference B
Group B Term Paper Due TBA
*** This syllabus is subject to change ***
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