This class will consider gestures in both their figurative and literal senses: gesture as in to “gesture towards” an idea, practice, or community; and gesture as in a physical gesture, one that comes from the body and speaks when words are not an option, at the limits of words, or alongside them. Taken together, “Feminist Gestures” will consider feminisms as both an embodied practice and a set of continuous processes. In doing so, we will look at issues of re-writing, intertextuality, and translation.

This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the individual to the global.

How do we define “nature”? While some might assign the status of nature to the non-human and the non-man-made (animals, plants, etc.), a problem emerges when we consider that humans, too, are animals (mammals). Would not genetic clones, indistinguishable from their originals, also complicate this perspective?

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love,” writes Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Implicit within this quote is the connection (or conflict) between friendship and romance. Tellingly, in several of Austen’s novels a significant shift takes place when a woman gets married; her best-friendship loses its relevance and her marriage takes centerstage. What does this say, Austen’s novels ask, about the (de)value of female friendships in a patriarchal world? Why does the marriage plot take precedence over friendship?

Across time, geographies, and cultures, artists have been driven to reflect on militarization and war. What does war do? How do soldiers, civilians, children, and "nations" become militarized? What role do artists play in militarized cultures? In this course we will examine how the arts are deployed in times of war, in militarized zones, in postwar memorializations, and in future fantasy wars. We will analyze "performance" in diverse militarized cultures through the technologies of animation, film, new media, and theatre.