16.00 Credits
Faculty: Elizabeth Williamson (English literature), Julia Zay (media production, cinema studies) Major areas of study include cultural studies, gender studies, cinema studies, photography, humanities, social and cultural history, history of art and visual culture. Class Standing: Juniors or seniors; transfer students welcome. Prerequisites: Successful experience in at least two of the following areas: 1. history, 2. critical theory, 3. art/media studies (film studies, media studies, art history, theater history, performance studies), 4. fine arts, performing arts, or media arts. Faculty signature required (see below). Faculty Signature: All interested students must submit an application. Application forms will be available in the Program Office, Seminar II A2117, at Academic Advising, Library 2100V, and outside faculty offices (Sem 2 E2112 and Sem 2 D2108). For more information contact Elizabeth Williamson, (360) 867-6015 or williame@evergreen. edu. Qualified students will be accepted until the program fills. Do you have a body Are you interested in how culture shapes that body Are you ready to pursue research, writing, and creative projects in the context of a program that will give your work richness, depth, and conceptual rigor This upper-level program combines the history of art and visual culture, theater studies, literature, and critical theory and includes a significant individual project component in winter quarter. Fashioning the Body explores the ways in which Western cultural forces have shaped our bodies and our images of them, as well as our efforts to "fashion" our own identities through the negotiation of these forces. Throughout the program we will move among traditional models of performance, in which actors recreate fictional roles within a theatrical space, a wider range of mediated performances represented in photography, film and video, and the social performances that structure everyday life. During the early modern period, "fashion," from the Latin verb facio ("to make") actively molded and defined personhood. But because it was detachable, and thus transferable, clothing also provided a space for resistance, allowing the body to function as a site for questions about the relationship between individual identity and social roles. Bodily fashioning becomes more complicated with the advent of photography and the moving image, but continues to raise questions of how individuals negotiate body imperatives. Early criminology, for instance, relied heavily on photographic portraiture, and early motion studies shot on film were used by scientists to explore human and animal movement. Using these and other examples, we will consider the central role photography and cinema play in molding 20th- and 21st-century ideas about embodied personhood. Techniques of fashioning the body can mean radically different things in different historical contexts. In contemporary Western societies, individuals have a variety of permanent and non-permanent options for fashioning their own bodies. Conceptual artists such as Adrian Piper and the French performer "Orlan" explore the tensions between modern and post-modern conceptions of embodied identity in provocative ways, helping to draw our attention to the cultural norms and hypocrisies around discourses of the body. In these and other contemporary examples, resistance is not a simple dynamic of pushing against social norms, but rather reconfiguring a wide range of cultural signifiers. During fall quarter, we will examine numerous examples of social fashioning and self-fashioning within particular cultural contexts. Students will view films and still images, read important pieces of theoretical literature and learn to engage with various cultural productions as thoughtful, professional critics. Critical reflections will take both written and visual form (essays and photography), and we will make regular use of online blogs as parallel discussion spaces and places to respond to