3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course looks at the phenomenon of body modification from the digital turn of the 1990s through contemporary queer and feminist post-body practices to body performances and transformations spanning the past 30 years. Our viewpoint will include questions around the contemporary aesthetics of “face and interface,” the flamboyant body in the current trans movement, as well as a more critical view of body modification raised by technological change such as AI generated influencers and more generally the status quo of the body’s “cosmesis,” or arrangement and adornment, in the era of social media and post-truth. We will be working with both primary sources from musicians and performers such as Arca to the trans ballroom phenomenon in Rio de Janeiro, as well as with secondary sources including the critical works by queer and intersectional theorists and feminist authors. Students will attend and participate in the classroom and will be writing a midterm and a final paper of their choice on the subject matter.