Fashioning the Body

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Suzannah Biernoff
• Assessment: a 5000-word coursework essay (100%)

The body is increasingly seen as a work-in-progress: a canvas or chronicle, something to be fashioned, curated, performed and narrated. In this module we trace the emergence of the ‘fashioned body’ since the 1920s, taking an interdisciplinary approach to changing ideas of beauty, imperfection, normality, desirability and disability. The module is not intended as a historical survey; rather, it is structured to encourage a critical and imaginative linking of intellectual debates and cultural objects, from Surrealist photography and interwar cosmetics advertising to the surgical imaginaries of body horror and the aesthetics of the prosthetically extended or enhanced body. Case studies will be explored in their historical contexts, but we will also think about different approaches to ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the body through discussions of foundational texts (by, amongst others, Norbert Elias, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Michel Foucault, Susan Bordo, Laura Mulvey and Julia Kristeva).

We begin by reflecting on what it means to approach the body as a historical entity. What kind of history does the human body have? Can we even refer to ‘the body’ as a shared category, a universal thing? This is followed by a session on the racial politics of beauty, which starts to unpick the modern beauty imperative by considering the structural violence it enacts on the black, female body. A discussion of biopower (Foucault) and Bordo’s seminal essay ‘Reading the slender body’ prefaces two sessions on the fashion image: one looking back at fashion photography’s love affair with Surrealism, the other pairing Cindy Sherman’s (anti-)fashion photographs with writing on abjection (Mulvey, Kristeva). Finally, we focus on materials and means of self-fashioning: surgical, prosthetic and cosmetic.

You will be able to pursue individual research interests in the option essay and might address, for example: feminist and queer perspectives on the fashioned body; topics related to disability or the body politics of race, gender, sexuality and social class; cross-fertilisations of art, film and fashion; forms of prosthetic embodiment (artificial limbs, facial prostheses, breast implants, virtual avatars); or representations of surgical transformation in popular culture. The final two weeks are devoted to essay workshops where you can share work in progress and explore common themes, questions and challenges.

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction: histories of the body
• The racial politics of beauty
• Body/Power: reading Foucault
• Fashion photography: Surrealism and its legacies
• Anti-fashion: Cindy Sherman's self-portraits
• The surgical imaginary
• Prosthetic self-fashioning
• The fashioned face