Body Politics

Full Tuition: $300 — Scholarship Options in Drop-Down Menu

Instructor: Stillman | 6-weeks | Sundays March 26-April 30 | 5:00-7:00 PM ET | ONLINE

It seems like a contradiction that someone could believe, on the one hand, that bodily sovereignty should never be violated, and on the other, that vaccines should be mandatory. And yet that was a belief held by many as the COVID pandemic played out. Do these simultaneous beliefs mean that we think we only own our own bodies up to a certain point? And if so, what point is that? And who gets to decide? And how?

In the age of the global anti-vax movement, the struggle for Trans rights, and the overturning Roe v. Wade, nothing is truer of contemporary politics than that they are the politics of the body. Simplistic conceptions of self-sovereignty are rotting away before us, and, with new fascisms looming, we’d be well-advised to pay attention.

That is the point of this course: to observe, analyze, and understand the ongoing mutations of body politics defining our historical present, and to experiment with the possibility of creating a future in which we’re all a little closer to freedom. To do so, we’ll be reading keystone accounts of biopolitics by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Carole Pateman’s foundational critique of constitutionalized patriarchy, Sabrina Springs’ groundbreaking work on the ubiquity of fatphobia and its origins in the slave trade, and ALOK’s poetic insistence on beauty in the face of fatal illness and chronic pain. Through these texts and others, we’ll pursue the questions of how and why the body is always-already political, how politics is first and foremost a matter of the body, and what we can do about the resurgence of eugenic, eco-cidal politics coursing the veins of the body politic today.

Classes are recorded to allow for students to participate asynchronously. If you want to take a class but cannot make the class time, sign up for the asynchronous audit option to follow along on your own. Recordings are password protected and will only be available for the duration of the class and two weeks after it ends.

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All tuition goes to paying instructors and staff a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class, and one full scholarship per person per term. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.

If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.