Unit details

ENGL1902 Reading Bodies

Credit

6 points

Offering
(see Timetable)

Availability	Location	Mode
Semester 1	UWA (Perth)	Face to face

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 1 option in the English and Literary Studies; Humanities in Health and Medicine; Gender Studies major sequences
• Level 1 elective

Content

The ways in which we understand 'the body' has profound implications for how we live and work as gendered, sexed, and raced subjects. This cultural studies unit investigates the way bodies can be 'read' over time and place, through medical, scientific, legal, literary and philosophical discourses, paying particular attention to the sexed body. It is interested in the way bodies are constructed through narrative tropes and conventions from the past, the present, and the future. Students think about the ways in which power relations are inscribed on bodies through bodily regimes to do with hair, muscularity, fertility and virility; how the value and vulnerability of bodily experiences like adolescence or breastfeeding or ageing are socially constructed, and how practices like circumcision, IVF or gender transitioning are complicated by the regulation of gender, sexuality, race and class. Ideas of power and performance as culturally and historically specific are useful in accounting for unpredictable bodies (like intersex babies), and the future of bodies in virtual reality and cyborg culture are investigated. The unit applies critical thinking from cultural studies and social theory to literary texts, contemporary print, art, and digital media, and everyday practices, to trace ideas of nature and culture, personal and political, individual and social as they converge around the body and the way we live. It makes for an absorbing broadening unit for anyone with a body.

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) articulate an historical and political cultural context for current understandings of the body and its relation to gender identity in contemporary Western culture; (2) demonstrate an understanding of the ways race, class, gender and sexuality are inscribed on the body as a set of power relations; (3) analyse literary texts, visual media, events or everyday practices for their representation of particular and imagined bodies; (4) be familiar with a range of theories about subjectivity and social power and the ways they can be applied to the representation and experience of particular bodies; (5) confidently employ a critical vocabulary of pivotal terms and concepts; and (6) undertake independent research, express research findings and ideas coherently and convincingly in appropriate written and oral forms.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) tutorial participation; (2) written assessment; and (3) an examination. Further information is available in the unit outline.

For units commencing in May 2022 or later the availability of the supplementary assessment is subject to confirmation.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Except where supplementary assessment is not available in a unit, it will be offered to students in all units who:

• Are in good academic standing overall;
• Have passed over half the units taken in the teaching period concerned, except where they are only enrolled in two or less units in the period;
• Have submitted all assessment items in the unit;
• Have achieved a mark between 45 and 49 for the unit overall, or the same mark in any failed component item in the unit; and
• No finding of academic misconduct has been made against them in the unit concerned.

Additionally student may apply for supplementary assessment in any unit which is the final unit required for graduation in there course and where they have achieved a mark between 45 and 49 for the unit overall, or the same mark in any failed component item in the unit.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Dr Chantal Bourgault du Coudray

Unit rules

Prerequisites:

Nil.

Co-requisites:

Nil.

Incompatibility:

Nil

Contact hours

2–3 hours per week