Introducing the IU seminar

Hi, all. I wanted to offer a bit more background on who showed up in the IU seminar today and a bit about what we talked about. The seminar has 17 students (currently) from Gender Studies, Applied Health Sciences, Folklore, Art History, and Communication and Culture. We are cross-listed with American Studies and Cultural Studies. At IU, Communication & Culture is a multi-disciplinary department, including Rhetoric & Public Culture, Film & Media Studies, and Performance/Ethnography (Anthropology). Students expressed a range of interests, including but not limited to: pregnancy/birth; military/memorials; sports; technolog/new media/cyborgs; identity (esp., gendered, sexed and sexualized); and body image/fat.

Beyond introducing ourselves, I raised a few points that folks may or may not wish to discuss further on the blog. First, I assigned Debbie Hawhee's book for next week along with readings from Plato and Descartes. The goal is to emphasize that body studies is not "new or "trendy"; in fact, as long as there have been academies, academics have studied bodies. So, whereas Plato and Descartes' writings represent the body/soul and body/mind splits that long have been perpetuated by some academics, Debbie's book provides a wonderful argument using historical evidence that the bodily arts long have been vital to rigorous scholarship and thinking (even for Plato himself). Looking at the U of I syllabus, I see all of you also will be discussing what a rhetorical approach to bodies might entail. Acknowledging the body is not new to the academy seems important not only to re-imagining what we have been taught about what it has meant to be an academic historically, but also what it could mean or become. Questions to consider: what myths remain about athletic bodies? about academic bodies? Who gains and who loses out when we perceive athletic and academic bodies in a rigid binary (opposing each other)? And what difference does a rhetorical approach to sports--or bodies--make? Is Grosz's (U of I reading) approach a rhetorical one, even if she might not claim it as such?

Haraway and Adams at IU

I am resisting blogging until Monday, once my seminar has had a chance to meet. But, I wanted to share the news with U of I folks that Donna Haraway, Carol Adams, and other well known body scholars are coming to IU next week for a conference on animals. For the program and more information, see: http://www.indiana.edu/~kspirits/

"New Materialisms" Group at UIUC this Fall

For those of us at UIUC who need another materiality fix on Monday nights - a mere three hours after our seminar on Bodies and Rhetoric ends - the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive theory is sponsoring a seminar/reading group entitled "New Materialisms" (upon linking, scroll down or select "seminars" at the top of the screen). It meets on five Monday nights throughout this semester.

The rationale for the group relates to what we discussed yesterday - the group wants to move away from conceiving bodies merely as sites of discursive production and consider how subjectivity might be conceived after reading in several fields, including physiology, science studies, and "(alternative) philosophical traditions." They will even be reading some Massumi and Grosz like our seminar, so I imagine there will be some crossover and those of us working in cultural, rhetorical, and writing studies could offer the group additional perspective.