Latino/a Performance (336-0-1)

Instructors

Gabriel Andres Guzman

Meeting Info

Wirtz 240 Seminar Room 2: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

How is fashion performed and expressed through the body as a performance of identity and culture? Understanding fashion as a modal practice that aestheticizes culture enables a deeper query into how identity becomes layered and expressed by and through the body across various contexts. In this course, students will each investigate the relationship between Latinx culture and fashion to consider how meaning is rendered and produced through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality. We will be focusing on how our upbringing influences the way we dress and how we feel in our body. Consequently, this class considers the home as a valuable site of knowledge production, considering how personal narrative, objects, and memory, underpin our understanding and experiences of fashion often rooted in survival. In doing so, this course will consider how media portrayal of fashion at the mainstream and local level across the late 20th century and 21st century overlaps with Latinx cultural histories and nostalgia. To develop our methodological wardrobe, we will engage with an array of critical texts and objects that highlight the intersections of gender, nationality, race, and class to understand the implications of fashioning culture on the body, that stratify between the runway and everyday life. This course will feature in-class workshops, artist talks, social media analysis (i.e: YouTube, TikTok), film, photography, and other media, culminating with a final creative project.