This course provides an advanced introduction to work at the intersection of critical theoretical concepts and critical technological practices. Focus on the history and philosophy of science and technology, and critical theoretical, artistic, and political engagements with technoscience. Readings from Habermas, Marcuse, Heidegger, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, in addition to feminist and postcolonialist critical engagements with the technoscientific.
(Same as Human 270)

Issues of gender and sexuality are central to the development of anatomical science in early modern Europe. From the 1543 publication of Vesalius' celebrated De humani corporis fabricaŠ, to William Hunter's equally celebrated Gravid Uterus of 1774, the female body in particular underwent a radical re-conceptualization that had repercussions well beyond the domain of medical science. Visual images played a critical role in this re-conceptualization of the body. Pictorial representations both reflected and influenced the scientific and biological construction of sexual difference. This course will focus on the rich history of anatomical representations and on the ways in which these images produced gendered, epistemological understandings of the body. We will start by examining critiques of Thomas Laqueur's "one sex" thesis in his book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Then, looking at a wealth of visual material, we will discuss the cross-fertilization of erotic and anatomical prints in the Renaissance; the persistence of moralizing sexual distinctions based on the prototypes of Adam and Eve; changes in the conceptualization of human reproduction and pregnancy; the life of certain allegorical
associations with anatomical imagery and the early modern discourse on monstrous births (including hermaphrodites). Included in the course will be visits to Special Collections at one or more of the following institutions: The Getty Research Center, The Clark Library, UCLA, The Huntington Museum and Library.
(Same as Visual Studies 295)

This seminar will examine key theoretical writings attending the political history of abolitionism in the United States. Organized around three abolitionist moments -- the movement to end slavery in the mid-19th century, the mid-20th century movement challenging Jim Crow segregation, and the contemporary prison abolition movement -- the seminar will engage literatures in the fields of criminology, sociology, philosophy, feminist theory and cultural studies. Engaging scholars such as Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Michel Foucault, Thomas Mathiesen, Angela Davis and Joy James, we will be concerned with using the analytical categories of race, class and gender to elaborate on radical criminology's critiques of prison reform, and ultimately, further attempting to articulate non-carceral alternatives to dominant modes of punishment.
(Same as Crm/Law C275)

Feminist Postcolonial Theory

Feminist postcolonial theory has emerged in the academy over the last two or so decades as an important analytic for cultural and social research. Beginning in the 1980's as an examination of "colonial discourse," influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism and also responding to question of difference in feminism, it has continued to investigate the problematic of difference in relation to other colonialisms than the European, and to disciplines that extend from literary studies to political science to legal studies. This course will survey three decades of postcolonial feminist theory through its most important debates and contributors as well as its critics.
(Same as Culture and Theory 289)