124263 KO Critical Media Analysis (2023W)

This class will start from a seemingly simple question: “What is the body?” Is it a project to be worked at, raw material to be shaped and formed according to fleeting ideals of beauty, productivity and the diet industry? Are we “multiple bodies” (Blackman, The Body 13) defined in their individuality by their capacity for affecting and being affected by other bodies? We will reflect our own embodied perspectives and address questions such as: How are our bodies gendered, racialized and “made into signs” (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 35) in different texts and media? What is a ‘normal’ body? When and how has ‘being healthy’ become an obligatory civil duty? How is otherness and dis/ability constructed? How do we talk about bodies in the digital age, with AI-driven face filters „optimizing“ our digital selves into blemish-free, ageless versions of our physical selves, although, as cyberfeminists argued in utopian texts from the 1990s, the confines of embodiment (race, gender, ability, etc.) would not have to matter anymore online? What does bodily autonomy, reproductive justice and bodily resistance mean in a post-Roe v. Wade World that is still characterized by omnipresent gendered violence?

After the successful completion of this course, students will be able to critically examine the role of ‘the body’ in a wide range of texts as they will have learned how to appropriately use a toolbox of genre-specific methods of cultural analysis (e.g. semiotic analysis, mis-en-scène analysis for moving images). Based on our class readings, students will learn how to notice and scrutinise cultural markers of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, body type, ability/health, and age in a variety of different media and online contexts, discuss their content and form with technical vocabulary, always keeping in mind questions of cultural production and consumption. By introducing students to key texts in gender, media and cultural studies and providing them with a toolkit for cultural analysis, students will be able to discuss the role of ‘the body’ in contemporary Anglophone media in an informed, intersectional way after they have completed this class, which provides a way into the complex, multidisciplinary field of ‘body studies’.