ENGL 4578 - Border Bodies: Critical Studies of Contemporary Body Politics

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 4578, FGSS 4578, LATA 4578, LSP 4578) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

E. Diaz.

This course investigates body politics in a global age and representations of gender across geopolitical literatures and cultures. We will read several texts that engage contemporary intersections of capitalism, transnational labor, feminism, and war. Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood (2005), for example, takes readers on a dark odyssey into Ciudad Juárez and the killing of young female factory workers; but readers experience this reality as a detective fiction. What does it mean to render a historical event as fiction? Alongside novels, we will examine different modes for representing body politics—documentary film, photographic essays, poetry, and testimonios. Exploring each work for its role in the formation of a transnational literacy, we will ask how the texts participate or intervene in gender and sexuality exploitations.