111-251/351 Theorising the Body in Australia

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Subject Description:

This subject considers the representation of the body in art and film in Australia through theories of the body in contemporary discourse. Judith Butler, Alphonso Lingis, Elizabeth Grosz, Sander Gilman and Julia Kristeva are considered in relationship to various representations of bodies in Australian cultural media. The body as an inscriptive site is considered through the tattooed body of South Pacific people, the shaved heads of convict men and women and the current fashion for tattooing the body in contemporary Australia. Theories of the abject body are studied in this context. European discourses of Civic Humanism are studied in relationship to the representation of the black body in academic painting and the Nietzchean ideals of the athletic and vigorous body are considered in relationship to the photographs of Max Dupain, the paintings of Hans Heysen and Herbert Badham, and to the cinematic body in Australia. The erotic body is examined in film and painting and the Homo-erotic and Lesbian body is discussed. The performative body in postmodern discourses and the idea of the disembodied body are also examined.

Assessment:

Prescribed Texts:

• Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Allen and Unwin, 1994.
• Ann Marsh, Body and Self, Performance Art in Australia 1969-92, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,1992.
• Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, The Re-invention of Nature, Routledge, 1991.
• Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, University of California Press, 1992.