This course concentrates on contemporary art and gender, sexuality and the body. Students will be introduced to a variety of key issues that contemporary practitioners address in work that explicitly engages with the body and its political meanings. The course will examine historical precedents for this diverse work: debates, controversies, resistances and social/political movements. The question of how art has influenced and responded to these broader movements for social change will be explored, with a particular emphasis on gender studies, transnational feminisms, queer theory, critical race theory, critical disability studies and postcolonialism. Ideas about how the body has been theorised, represented, ignored or fetishised will be considered in the context of contemporary art. Difference – here understood as a critical aspect of political identities and orientations – will be investigated through art that addresses the body.