Embodiment, Biopolitics and Technologies KVIK 206 Course Tutors: Nadzeya Husakouskaya ([email protected]) Donna McCormack ([email protected]) Picture copyright: Tero Saarinen company Embodiment, Biopolitics and Technologies KVIK 206 Course Tutors: Nadzeya Husakouskaya and Donna McCormack This course offers a critical engagement with theories of embodiment, with a specific focus on the role of biopolitics and technologies in the production, reconfiguration and contestation of normative bodily forms. The course is grounded in feminist, gender and queer, as well critical race and postcolonial, theories of the body. Students will critically analyze theories of biopower, biotechnologies and biopolitics through focused readings of critical sources, visual materials, literary and cinematic texts, and secondary sources. Students will engage with a broad spectrum of issues that are concerned with a contextualized reading of the body in relation to both technology and politics. Therefore topics that may be addressed in the course include: transgender, intersex, and socio-cultural anxieties of (un)doing gender; embodied resistance to cultural norms in a techno-pharmaco-pornographic era; technologies, nationhood and postcolonialism; monstrous embodiment; narratives of health and illness; and queer and disability theories. The course aims to develop critical thinking skills, specifically in relation to issues concerning gender, sexuality, race, the body, the nation, ability, and the production of normativity. It further aims to enable students to gain a range of analytical skills in engaging with varying socio-political and cultural phenomena. Students should also expect to have the opportunity to develop knowledge of the theoretical field of embodiment, biopolitics and technology. The textual focus will be broad and will therefore include a wide range of sources from gender studies, queer and feminist theories, cultural studies, sociology, literature and cinema, and anthropology. Along with primary and secondary mandatory readings, the course will also include one screening of a film. The assessment will include one presentation to be given during the seminars and one take-home exam to be completed after the course. Embodiment, Biopolitics and Technologies KVIK 206 CONTENTS Introduction – Becoming a Body (August 22, 2014) Mandatory Readings Sara Ahmed, ‘Embodying Strangers’, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 38–54. Jasbir Puar, ‘The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints’, GLQ 18.1 (2011), pp. 149– 158. Noreen Giffney & Myra Hird, ‘Queering the Non/Human’, Queering the Non/Human, ed. by Noreen Giffney & Myra Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–16. Optional Readings Donna Haraway, ‘Companion Species, Mis-recognition and Queer Worlding’, Queering the Non/Human, ed. by Noreen Giffney & Myra Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. xxiii–xxvi. Anne McClintock, ‘The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism’, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 21–74. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Studies and the History of Sexuality’, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 1–18. Technologies and Politics of Life, Race and Sexuality (August 29, 2014) Mandatory Readings Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997). Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 1–7. Optional Readings bell hooks, ‘Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace’, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 122–132. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–15. Biopolitics, Capitalism and Pharmocopornagraphic Era (September 5, 2014) Mandatory Readings Michel Foucault, ‘Lecture from 17 March 1976’, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 237–264. Beatriz Preciado, ‘The Pharmacopornographic Era’, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmocopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), pp. 23–54. Michelle O’Brien, ‘Tracing This Body: Transsexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism’, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker & Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 56–65. Optional Readings Michel Foucault, ‘We “Other Victorians”’ and ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, [1976] 1998), pp.1–15 and pp. 15–50. Postcolonial Clinics and the Violence of Health Care (September12, 2014) Mandatory Readings Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest (London: Aurora Metro Press, 2003). Michel Foucault, ‘A Political Consciousness’, Birth of the Clinic (London: Routledge, [1963] 1994), pp. 22–37. Optional Readings Lawrence Cohen, ‘The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition’, Body & Society 7.9 (2001), pp. 9–29. Freaks, Animals and Non/Humans (September 19, 2014) Mandatory Watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alien: Resurrection (2007) – this film will be screened prior to the seminar at a prearranged time. Mandatory Readings Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, ‘From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. by Rosemarie GarlandThompson (New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp. 1–19. Patricia MacCormack, Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing), pp. 1–12. Optional Readings Sarah Franklin, ‘Origins’, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–17. Normalizing Trans*Bodies: (Un)diagnosing Gender (September 26, 2014) Mandatory Readings Judith Butler, ‘Undiagnosing Gender’, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 75–101. Aren Aizura, ‘The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: “Race”, Labor and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics’, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker & Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 496–511. Nikki Sullivan, ‘Transmogrification: (Un)becoming Other(s)’, The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 552–564. Dan Irving, ‘Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive’, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker & Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 15–29. Optional Readings Susan Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledge: An Introduction to Transgender Studies’, The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–17. Sandy Stone, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 221–235. Medical Authority and Intersex Subversion (October 3, 2014) Mandatory Readings Cheryl Chase, ‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism’, The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. by Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 300–314. Judith Butler, ‘Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality’, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 57–74. Brenna Munro, ‘Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 11.4 (2010), pp. 383–396. Optional Readings Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’, Herculine Barbin (London: Vintage Books, 2010), pp. vii–xvii. Judith Butler, ‘Foucault, Herculine, and the politics of sexual discontinuity’, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 93–111. Katrina Karkazis, ‘Fixing Sex: Surgery and the Production of Normative Sexuality’, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority and Lived Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 133– 176. Gendered Bodies: Performance, Representation, Technotopias (October 17, 2014) Mandatory Readings Judith (Jack) Halberstam, ‘Drag Kings: Masculinity and Performance’, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 231–266. Judith Butler, ‘Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion’, Bodies That Matter: On Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 121–142. Judith (Jack) Halberstam, ‘Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art’, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, New York University Press, 2005), pp. 97–124. Optional Readings Alison Bechdel, ‘Chapter 4’, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), pp. 87–120. Ann Cvetkovic, ‘Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1–2 (2008), pp. 111–128. Self, Other and Corporeal Cuts (October 24, 2014) Mandatory Readings Richard McCann, ‘The Resurrectionist’, The Best American Essays 2000 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 1–13. Margrit Shildrick, ‘Corporeal Cuts: Surgery and the Psycho-social’, Body & Society 14.1 (2008), pp. 31–46. Optional Readings Margrit Shildrick, ‘Imagining the Heart: Incorporations, Intrusions and Identity’, Somatechnics 2.2 (2012), pp. 233–249. Hopeful Monsters and Queer Disability (October 31, 2014) Mandatory Readings Hiromi Goto, ‘Hopeful Monsters’, Hopeful Monsters (Vancouver Arsenal Press, 2004), pp. 135–168. Robert McRuer, ‘Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence’, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York Press, 2006), pp. 1–32. Optional Readings ‘“Whatever That Is”: Hiromi Goto’s Body Politic/s’, Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007), pp. 75–96. Body, Resistance and Queer Futurity (November 7, 2014) Mandatory Readings José Estaban Muñoz, ‘Introduction: Feeling Utopia’, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York University, 2009), pp. 1–18. Jessica Zychowicz, ‘Two Bad Words: FEMEN & Feminism in Independent Ukraine’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 29.2 (2011), pp. 215–227. Samantha Kwan and Louise Marie Roth, ‘The Everyday Resistance of Vegetarianism’, Embodied Resistance. Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, ed. by Chris Bobel & Samantha Kwan (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), pp. 186–196. Optional Readings Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, ‘Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got’, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. by Susan Stryker & Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 653 – 667.