Authoring Gender and the Body

Across time, place, and discipline, the body has been a contested site of complex experiences of gender and sexuality. This course asks: how have a diverse array of authors used writing about the body to enter these debates? We will engage multiple disciplines of body-writing - theory, memoir/autobiography, political manifesto, and scientific discourse - and ground in foundational gender studies texts while driving toward hyper-contemporary, intersectional feminist, gender, and sexuality discourses. Interrogating themes such as power, class, race, pleasure, trauma, migration, disability, reproduction, beauty, transition, sustainability, technology, and intersectionality, collectively we will ask: How does body-writing connect the literary, scientific, political, personal, and metaphysical concerns of multiple liberation movements? How does the body become a site of interdisciplinary feminist, gender, and sexuality knowledge production? As this is a Writing in the Major course, assigned reading will provoke our own writing, and each student will conduct a research project focused on an author, genre, and/or theme of their choice.