Bodies: A Digital Companion Main Menu Why the Body? an introduction to the digital companion Embodiment key concept Cultural Norm key concept Bodily Difference key concept Stigma key concept Intersectionality key concept Body Image Dr. Kristin Novotny, Professor COR 240-04/05 Spectral and Invisible Bodies Dr. Veruska Cantelli, Assistant Professor Visibility / Invisibility / Hypervisibility Alice Neiley, Adjunct Professor Radical Awakening Faith Yacubian, Assistant Professor Paleo Erik Shonstrom, Assistant Professor Borderlands Dr. Patricia DeRocher Walking Dr. Katheryn Wright, Associate Professor (COR-240-03) The Posthuman Dr. Katheryn Wright, Associate Professor Methodologies This page contains links to short explanations of the different methodologies used to understand bodies and embodiment. The Body Project overview of the common assignment Acknowledgements a list of contributors to 'Bodies: A Digital Companion'

Spectral and Invisible Bodies: Introduction and Contents

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“What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost—that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present—into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. It is a case of the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice.” From Ghostly Matters by Avery F. Gordon

This semester we will explore bodies in relation to spectrality, invisibility and absence. We will spend the first part of our semester tackling readings that will give us the chance to familiarize and problematize notions of body/mind and embodiment. From here we will enter a discussion into invisibility from perspectives that will intersect with race, gender, and class. What determines invisibility and what is its relation to power and authority? What is the role of camouflage? Is there a gateway to invisibility? How does absence/disappearance (forced, imposed, chosen) take its form in our own perception of space and place? How does the body occupy a space of non-belonging? These and other questions will also allow us to explore bodies in connection to activism: how might invisibility be a way to resist as a dissenting strategy? How can it be viewed as an assigned narrative of predetermined failure? As final projects you will be encouraged among other themes, to study ghosts as metaphors for absences/disappearances, as a phenomenon in the context of war, conflict, folklore, or personal narratives. 

Readings on CANVAS

​1) Elizabeth Grosz, "Refiguring Bodies" 
​2) Avery F. Gordon, “Her shape and his hand” 
3) Avery F. Gordon, “the other door, its floods of tears with consolation enclosed” 
4) Digital Storytelling TBD
5) Michel Foucault, "Docile Bodies" 

This page has paths:

  1. Spectral and Invisible Bodies Katheryn Wright

Contents of this path:

  1. Nirmal Puwar, “Dissonant Bodies" in Space Invaders Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004)
  2. Nirmal Puwar, “(In)Visible Universal Bodies” in Space Invaders Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004)
  3. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, "Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary/Introduction" in The Spectrality Reader (2013)
  4. "The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black" in The Stranger (2017)
  5. Zoe Samudzi, "Who Are You and What Do You Really Know? Gaslighting and Dolezalean logic" in The New Inquiry (2017)
  6. Jo Rosenthal, "a timeline of the Dana Schutz Emmett Till painting controversy"
  7. Flavio Rizzo, "Hikikomori: The Postmodern Hermits of Japan" in Warscapes (2016)
  8. Coco Fusco, "Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till" in Hyperallergic (2017)
  9. Judith Butler, "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street" in eipcp, 2011
  10. Susan Bordo "Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body" in Unbearable Weight, Feminism, Western Culture and the body (1993)