In what ways is writing necessarily gendered? Or raced? Or seen through the lens of class? This class will take up "the body" as a site of radical cultural production as expansively as possible, considering some of the forms in which bodies are othered through language, including through discourses of disability, gender performance, and other zones of often-felt difference and social dislocation.
Though this is primarily a creative writing class, our writing will push itself outside its usual modes of expression. We will explore texts anthologized in the recent collection Troubling the Line, as well as in past collections, such as texts from The Black Arts Movement. We will discuss and critique the rich tradition of "somatic" practices in the world of performance and live art and we will familiarize ourselves with important recent experiments in poetry and prose by authors such as kari edwards, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Renee Gladmann. Our end goal will be to curate a show and live reading that provides us a space to test out some of our textual experiments.
To be successful in this course, students will need access to the internet. Synchronous class time will be divided between online lecture, seminar, and writing workshops. Students should expect to spend about the same amount of time (4 hours a week) working asynchronously on their own or in small groups.
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Arts, activism, graduate study