I’m back on campus, busy reacquainting myself with my office. Spring semester classes start February 19, and I’ve got syllabi to write (or, at least, update).
In addition to my “bread and butter” Western Civilization courses, I’m teaching my Women in American Society class and a Humanities special course entitled “Beauty, the Body, and the Western Tradition”. Here’s part of my introductory spiel:
This course provides an interdisciplinary look at historical and contemporary attitudes towards male and female bodies. We live in a culture obsessed with beauty and sexuality and power; we also live in a culture in which millions of our fellow citizens are profoundly uncomfortable with their own flesh. This course will ask tough questions about the relationship between the body and the mind, the body and the culture, the body and the state. We will look at how attitudes towards beauty, the body, and weight have changed over the last several centuries in European and American society. Students will be asked to think and write about their own experiences as embodied people, and will be asked to analyze words and (especially) the images they see around them.
Though I’ll be supplementing this reading list, the core four texts for the class are:
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (Courtney Martin)
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Susan Bordo)
The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (Susan Bordo)
Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Joan Brumberg)
It’s only the second time I’ve taught the course; it debuted in Spring 2004, and for various reasons, I haven’t taught it since. It’s an emotionally challenging course for both me and my students. I have struggled with body issues, disordered eating, and exercise addiction since I was in my teens. My students (who, judging from the class roster, will be largely female) surely will have their own complex and often unhappy stories to tell. And though the academic and the therapeutic are not always mutually exclusive, the class will not be an extended opportunity for each student to process through his or her own issues with the body. Rather, the course offers an introduction to how the body has been represented by medicine, religion, high and popular culture in the Western world since the Middle Ages.
It was a tough course to teach the first time around, and I don’t suspect it will be easier this year. But I am excited about doing this work with my students, collaborating with them to fashion a better understanding of how we got here, to this place where so many of us are filled with anxiety or distaste or shame about our own flesh.
I’ll report, particularly about how my students respond to Courtney Martin’s book, the one new text I’ll be employing.
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