Topics in Latina and Latino Text and Representation (393-0-3)
Topic
Feminist Aesthetics of the Erotic
Instructors
Elvia Mendoza
Crowe Hall, Room 1144
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-410: Tues, Thurs 3:00PM - 4:20PM
Overview of class
This course delves into how the erotic informs acts of refusal and visions of liberation. Claiming the erotic as a "necessary source of power" for change, Audre Lorde speaks of it as the "creative energy empowered, the knowledge and the use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives." Putting her uses of the erotic in conversation with Gloria Anzaldua's borderlands theory serves as our point of departure. We explore how Black and Brown artists, scholars, philosophers, and other critical thinkers reclaim and assert the erotic and the body as Lorde says, "a source of power" that creates change in enacting other possibilities. We will study personal essays, visual art and performance, music, creative literature, film, photography, and playscripts to explore themes of liberation, loss, self-possession, desire, critical consciousness, self-making, resistance, survival, and love. What are the nuances these different forms of expression and their creators reveal and what can they tell us for what we understand as acts of refusal?
Class Materials (Required)
Sirena Selena: A Novel, by Mayra Santos-Febres
The Loss of All Lost Things: Stories, by Amina Gautier
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area