PhD Course: `The Body in Feminist Theory and Practice`

The idea for this course emerged in the wake of the recent upsurge of interest in the body in society at large, in public/political debates, and within contemporary feminist scholarship. It has two aims. The first is to explore some of the ways in which the body can become a subject of feminist inquiry, as well as to address the possibilities and problems involved in doing research on the body from a feminist perspective. The second aim is to discuss and interrogate the ways in which our own embodiment as researchers impinges on the work we do. None of us -whether feminists or not- are the idealized disembodied subjects of Enlightenment mythology or disinterested rational agents in search of objective/neutral knowledge about the bodies of others. Learning to take our own bodies - bodies which are marked by sex, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and more - into account is not only 'politically correct'. It is integral to producing embodied and passionate knowledge -the cornerstone of any feminist inquiry. In this course, scholars from different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds will describe how they approached the body as research object in their own inquiry, discussing some of the methodological 'ins' and 'outs' of doing research on the body from a feminist and/or critical perspective. They will also address the effects of their own 'embodiedness' on their actual research practices. Special emphasis will be given to poststructuralist theories of embodiment and to psychoanalytic notions of the body. Participants will be required to interrogate their own research along similar lines: how can they treat the body as an object of critical (feminist) inquiry and how can they situate themselves as embodied researchers.