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Research Seminar: Selected Issues and Topics— National Bodies, Sexual Subjects
ETHSTD 250 004 | CCN: 40850
M 11:00 am - 1:59 pm This class will be held at the Shorb House: 2547 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA 94720
4 Units
This class will interrogate how sexual subjects and the subjects of sex disrupt projects of subjectivity, identity, and nation. Drawing on performance studies, law, queer of color critique, disability studies and critical theories of discipline, power, and sexuality, this class will examine how forms of embodiment, including, but also exceeding, race and gender, inform sexual pleasures and sexual practices and how these impact understandings of political projects of social change. Central questions for mutual consideration include: What constitutes a sexual subject? How are discourses of sex and sexuality electrified through affect, bodily practices, scenes of encounter and social formations? What happens when we allow the fluids, smells, sounds, and gestures of sex to seep into discourses of the state, the civic, the domestic, the corporeal? What excesses, ruptures, or collisions exist between these multiple discursive frames? How are foundational epistemologies of power and embodiment (trans)formed in the process of these utterances? Themes for our mutual consideration will include experience, abjection, gesture, discipline, fantasy, submission and touch.