Subject Area: Women's and Gender Studies
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: Philosophy

How has the way we understand the body developed and changed in response to social change? And what kind of body does Western philosophy assume, when it addresses the body at all? Is the body always already a gendered body? This course introduces students to ideas about the body and how embodiment has been theorised by the Western philosophical tradition. The course will consider the apparent relationship between the body and ‘the human’, the body and reason, and the body and creativity, among other questions. A guiding thread for the course is the question: Is the body always already a gendered body? Early modern philosophy from Descartes pitted the body against the mind, and also identified 'man' with the mind while 'woman' was understood to be associated with bodily processes. The course prompts students to ask: What has been the significance of this way of thinking about the relation of body and mind to gender politics? How have philosophers, and particularly philosophers of feminism, challenged this schema? And to what extent does contemporary philosophy continue to struggle with the question of the body?

Key philosophers the course covers may include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lloyd, Harraway, Bordo, Marion-Young, Ahmed, Grosz and Diprose.