Seminar in Historical Analysis (405-0-22)
Topic
Body in Time
Instructors
Dyan H Elliott
847/491-7652
Harris Hall Room 337
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Topic: The Body in Time
The body has been the focus of scholarly interest for the several decades in practically all fields and periods. It has been examined from multiple perspectives: as a sexualized transmitter of original sin; as ultimate guarantor of survival in the afterlife; as alternately intrinsic to and separate from gender roles; as sexually indeterminate; as an object of dissection; as entity to be manipulated by eugenics; as spectacle; as conveyor of psychological trauma; and many more. Scholars have also become increasingly aware of the more abstract uses of the body, such imagistic uses for uniting society into a corporate whole. This course considers these perceptions through the prism of history and fluctuating theoretical perspectives.
Learning Objectives
The student will have a grasp of the way in which perceptions of the body changed in over a millennium of Western History and how
Evaluation Method
Discussion, Presentations, Short Papers, Final Historiographical Paper (ca. 15 pp plus bibliography worth 25% of grade)
Class Materials (Required)
Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and he Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 2006. ISBN-13: 78-0415389556
Caroline Walker Bynum. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion . New York: Zone Books, 1992. ISBN-13: 978-0942299632
Anne Fausto-Sterling. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Publisher: Basic Books; New Ed, 2000. ISBN-13: 978-0465077144
Thomas Laqueur. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard UP, 1992.; ISBN-13: 978-0674543553
Levine, Philippa. Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction. 2d ed. Oxford UP 2017 ISBN: 978-01993385904
Katharine Parks. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1890951689
Rachel Maines. The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction . Johns Hopkins UP, 2001 ISBN-13: 978-0801866463
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States ISBN-13: 978-0674013797
Streets, Heather. Martial Races: The Military Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914. Manchester University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0719069635