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COURSES FALL 2008

Histart 285

GRADUATE SEMINAR: 20TH CENTURY ART: SEX AND THE CITY: GENDER, URBAN SPACE, AND THE VISUAL CULTURE (4 units) Thursdays, 2-5 425 Doe , CCN: 05706 Aruna D'Souza

This course will explore the intersection of a range of writings on gender and the city and a range of visual cultural practices, from advertising and posters, to artworks, to films, that address the modern phenomenology of urban space. The course will be organized around themes addressing the ways in

which the figure of the Other -- primarily women's bodies, but also queer and racialized bodies -- trouble the city (and make trouble for the city). For example, bourgeois anxieties over prostitution can be fruitfully brought to bear on an examination of both Impressionist paintings and Godard's cinema; the figure of the flâneur (the upper-class male stroller) was an organizing principle of 19th-century modern life painting in France, but was figured as an impossibility when faced with a racialized Other in travel literature of the same period, and was later parodied in the mid-20th century in films by Jacques Tati; the question of when walking turns to cruising introduces questions of queer sexuality into urban experience; and the (im)possibility of woman's seamless appropriation of the city has been explored by artists and by theorists, both male and female, since the 1970s.

 

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