Literary and Cultural Theory: Bodies of Transformation

Engaging trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: what is the corporeal real? how does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? how might one approach nonhuman interiority?