Anthropology: Gender Sex Race & the Body

Cross-cultural study of gender, sex, sexuality, and race including exploring the cultural construction of categories and cultural practices related to the body and gender, sex, sexuality, and race. Prerequisite: ANTH 1100, GSWS 1010, or GSWS 1500. Cross-listed with: GSWS 2715.

Prereqs enforced by system: ANTH 1100, GSWS 1010, or GSWS 1500. Cross-listed with GSWS 2715; total combined enrollment: 40 PACE students with permission and override

What are bodies? How do they facilitate and delimit how people come to know and live in the world? How might studies focused on embodied experience differently inform our grasp of how larger systems of power, privilege, personhood, mobility, ability, and value operate? While cultural anthropology has long considered the body in its investigations, most pre-1970s studies did not center it not as a central topic of study, but as means to entertain more prioritized questions of the social and the cultural. Increasingly, however, cultural anthropologists have turned from presumptions of the body as a fixed object to see it instead as a product shaped by situating histories, ideologies, and discourses. In this course, we will examine conceptualizations, positionings, and uses of body across several world contexts to examine how biological, cultural and political ideas about what bodies are and whose bodies matter shape not only people’s experiences of the world but their perceptions of self and others within it as well. Spanning themes such as religion, pain, sovereignty, medicine and wellness, beauty, and dress, we will analyze perspectives that make sense of ‘body’ not only as bio-cultural entity but also as experience, phenomenon, social currency, and political symbol.

Students are expected to complete readings, participate in class discussions, and invest in the self-reflection necessary to critically engage themes of race, gender, sexuality, body and embodiment and identity. By the end of this course, students will: 1.) Understand that ‘bodies’ are socially constructed and culturally shaped phenomena, and be able to have discussions on those terms 2.) Be able to explain embodiment and its various interpretations and contributions to widening the scope of anthropological engagement 3.) Articulate how race, gender, and sexuality–among other axes of identity–have been signified through bodies and representations thereof, and towards what ends

Grades are based on attendance and participation, reading reflections, writing assignments, and a final creative paper and project.