Body Politics
POL 382 with Prof. Lexi Neame explores how we and our bodies are being politicized based on race, sexuality, and gender.
How do our bodies exist in the political sphere? What aspects of our bodies determine how we are objectified or commodified? These are just a few of the questions that Professor Lexi Neame’s class, Body Politics, aims to answer. The conference-based class is filled with “intense, rigorous, and sometimes contentious discussion,” says Prof. Neame.
In class Prof Neame and her students explore the politics of embodiment in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, and dis/ability. They will consider practices of resistance to and through these categories and how people and movements take up, contest, resignify or refuse them. Students will also engage with conceptual and normative debates surrounding controversial bodily practices from a range of perspectives: liberal humanist, radical and phenomenological, black feminist, intersectional, queer and trans* theory. Throughout the semester they will discuss and learn about the ways that bodies are objectified and commodified, marked as deviant or abnormal, and explore where processes of sexed, raced, gendered, and able-bodied normalization intersect and diverge.
Bambi Massey ’23, who is currently enrolled in the course, says, “In Lexi’s Body Politics class, I feel like I’m learning about my personal area of interest in a class for the first time in my life. It has caused me to think deeply about my own body and the relationship that it has with the world, through the oppressions it faces, the privileges it holds, and the conformity or lack thereof that it exhibits to normative expectations of what a body “should be” or “should do”. Massey’s whose thesis engages heavily with this subject continues, “through engaging with social issues through a number of different lenses (radical feminism, Black feminism, phenomenology, etc), we’re asked to think in ways I had never even considered about something as seemingly simple as just existing in your body, which really helps to reveal just how complicated and confusing it is to inhabit a body, as well as how empowering and emotional it can be.”
Prof. Neame’s research and teaching interests are in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic and feminist theory, and the politics of science, technology and the environment. Her book manuscript (tentatively called Common Knowledge) is occasioned by the crisis of authoritative knowledge in democratic societies. It draws on the thoughts of Hannah Arendt in order to explore how scientific and technical knowledge translates, circulates, and becomes contested in the public realm. Prof. Neame is also involved in an interdisciplinary research project called Arendt on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene (), funded by Humanities Without Walls and the Mellon Foundation. She received a PhD from Northwestern and taught at Stanford before coming to Reed.
Readings from the course include both classic and contemporary works like:
- Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,
- Adrienne Rich’s "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,"
- The Combahee River Collective’s “”
- Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto
- Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip
- Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons