The Ohio University Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies program offers a new Fall 2018 online course. WGSS 6000: Gendered Bodies, is a fully online, graduate-level course.
- WGSS 6000, #14736, section 101: Gendered Bodies (fully online; 4 credit hours) Space is limited to 10 students.
This course asks how gendered bodies are created through systems of power, and how we embody gender. It uses primarily phenomenological and Foucauldian approaches to analyze how gender is embodied in arenas such beauty, race, sports and play, menstruation, sexuality, disability, cancer, intersex, trans experiences, and pregnancy. It inquires into how power has shaped these embodied phenomena and considers how they might be experienced differently under altered configurations of power.
“How do shame, fear, joy, pleasures, pain, self-surveillance, movement and comportment reinforce (or contest) gendered power? We will analyze how ideas and discourses collide with the ‘lived body’ – specifically, how people who identify experience their bodies particularly with regard to scientific and medical power/knowledge related to gender,” says Dr. Julie White, who teaches the course.
“Our readings will emphasize women’s bodies, in part because the phenomenological literature on men’s and trans/non-binary bodies is relatively limited, and in part because ‘the body’ still tends to be more salient to women due to their long-standing identification with nature and fleshiness. However, we will try to keep a comparative perspective, examining other genders’ bodily experiences and the discourses that shape them, as well,” adds White, Professor of Political Science and a core WGSS faculty member.
White, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has focused specifically on the ethics and politics of care-work and she is the author of Democracy, Justice and the Welfare State: Reconstructing Public Care and contributor to Care Ethics and Political Theory.
Sign up soon; space is limited to 10 students.
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