Bodies

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenors: Dr Yasmeen Narayan, Dr Silvia Posocco
• Assessment: a 500-word reflexive piece of writing (20%) and 2500-word essay (80%)

In this module we introduce you to key debates in the study of the body and embodiment in the social sciences and the humanities. The module is divided into four sections:

• The Social Body
• The Phenomenological Body
• Body Politics
• The Body Multiple

Key concepts and perspectives covered include:

• techniques of the body
• symbols, social skin, bodiliness
• structuralism, nature and culture, sex and gender
• cultural phenomenology, embodiment and experience
• pain, somatic cultures and the materiality of domination
• the senses and sensorial memory
• circuits of commodification and exchange
• bodily transformation, body projects, aesthetics
• bodies of bioscience and bioethics
• bodies, virtuality, shifting scales.

By the end of this module, you should have:

• a working knowledge of the conceptual tools for addressing the place of the body in debates over identities and differences across the lifecycle
• an ability to think critically about whether bodies are best seen as merely biological or ‘natural’, or, rather, as rendered meaningful through the diverse cultural forces impinging upon them
• a capacity to appreciate the possibilities and perils of moving between biological, psychological, social and cultural understandings of the body, when reflecting on the dilemmas and anxieties of the present.