Embodiment Theory Course

Embodiment Theory

Image of Balinese Dancers by Inno Kurnia from Pixabay

A Note From Deidre

This course was taught at Oberlin College in the Spring of 2006 and was designed for weekly 3-hour seminars. This is not a graduate level course as it doesn't have an extensive reading list; however, the readings are at an advanced level (approx 40 pages per week) and it could serve as a foundation for a graduate level course. This course has been slightly modified for on-line use with elaborations added for instructors.

While many of the classes and readings open questions about race, ethnicity and class, none address these head-on. There is lots of room to expand or substitute in these directions.

Course Description

This readings seminar confronts the problem of "the body" through selected readings across disciplines, comparing approaches and analyzing their implications for research, performance and social action.

We know that our experiences as embodied beings, our beliefs about the body, and our perceptions about others' bodies are socially constructed and speak of membership in a culture. Given the multiplicity of discourses about embodiment, how are we to sort through what it is to be embodied? What kinds of questions are we even to pose about embodiment?

We will chew on some of the following (You are encouraged to add your own questions!):

- What is the relationship between ideas about the body and our own embodied practices and experiences?

- What is it to know something somatically, through movement, pain and other bodily sensations?

- How are race, ethnicity, class, and gender registered in bodily practice?

- How are our own bodily practices and rhetoric implicated in larger local and global, historical, social, and political systems?

- What, indeed, is "the body," relative to the person, the world and language?

- How does this kind of knowledge relate to knowledge in other sensory modes?

Course Topics

Week 1 Knowing One's Embodied Self

Week 2 Movement in Cultural Context

Week 3 The Argument for Awareness

Week 4 Bodies in Pain

Week 5 The Ritual Body

Week 6 The "Habitus"

Week 7 Performing Gender

Week 8 Cultivating the Body

Week 9 Semiotics of Sensation

Week 10 Embodiment Vs. The Body

Week 11 The Medical Body

Course Goals

-To consider critically and culturally specifically 'the body' and 'embodiment'.

-To engage in a dialogue with a cross-disciplinary selection of readings on embodiment.

-To appreciate how each conceptualization influences actual bodily practices and attitudes.

-To evaluate the implications of each conceptualization concerning sociality, agency, and perspective.

-To sample these concepts through case studies.

-To experience these concepts physically as well as verbally in classroom exercises.