News & Events

Coming Spring 2019!

SOC 410: Sociology of the Body.  How are our senses, our movements, and even our hearts attuned to interacting with other people?  What do prosthetics, body modifications, and body image tell us about social structures?  Do our bodies play any role in online and virtual communities?  Do our bodily habits reproduce cultural inequalities, even if we are unaware of them?  How are gender, race, and sexuality inscribed and policed through bodies?  This class introduces students to major perspectives in the sociological study of the body that address these and other related questions.

Topics for this course bring the social sciences into dialogue with other fields, including biology, medicine, philosophy, and technology.  Course readings and activities emphasize the diversity of scholarship and its contemporary relevance to the ways human bodies relate to society.  The course is composed of units that reflect topical distinctions: (1) an overview of approaches to the social study of the body, senses, and gestures; (2) habitual practices, discipline, power, and cultural reproduction; (3) self-experience, emotions, body modification, and social change; (4) racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies; and (5) materiality, technology, and enablement. Class periods combine lecture, discussion, and in-class activities regarding the assigned readings and related topics.