Unit details

ENGL1902 Reading Bodies

Credit

6 points

Offering
(see Timetable)

If this unit does not have an online alternative, then students who are presently unable to enter Western Australia and whose studies would be delayed by an inability to complete this unit, should contact the unit coordinator (details given on this page) to ascertain, on an individual case-by-case basis, if alternate arrangements can be made to support their study in this unit.

Availability	Location	Mode
Semester 1	UWA (Perth)	Face to face Predominantly face-to-face. On campus attendance required to complete this unit. May have accompanying resources online.

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 1 option in the 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.

Supplementary assessment is not available in this unit except in the case of a bachelor's pass degree student who has obtained a mark of 45 to 49 overall and is currently enrolled in this unit, and it is the only remaining unit that the student must pass in order to complete their course.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Dr Chantal Bourgault du Coudray

Unit rules

Incompatibility:

GEND1902 Reading Bodies

Contact hours

2–3 hours per week