The human body has played a central role in western art and visual culture. Yet, visual representations of the body have only become a serious object of academic study since the 1970s, stimulated by feminist practices and gender studies. This course explores the body and its representations as loci of shifting signs, views, and interpretations. The main question is how historical and geographical circumstances – including social relations, religious views, scientific norms and issues of power – determine the depiction, representation and experience of human bodies. The course covers various forms of art, fashion and media in several historical periods. We will examine images and imaginings of ideal, deviant, and fragile bodies in relation to desire, beauty ideals, and divine perfection, but also in relation to repulsion, abjection and normalizing discourses.  Many relevant themes will be discussed, such as the relation between the spiritual and the corporeal, as in incarnation and ostentation vulnerum; pictorial embodiment in connection to bodily absence; body politic and the bodyscape; affect and identity; corporeal materiality and bodily fluids; and human and posthuman bodies.

We will read texts by (among others) Hans Belting, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Amelia Jones, Julia Kristeva, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Leo Steinberg.