Material Feminist Practices in a Body Politics Seminar

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois In these teaching notes, I want to focus on two course projects in which students apply materialist feminist practices within a capstone women’s studies seminar entitled Body Politics. Undertaking these projects, students become more critically aware of gendered materialities that they had previously taken for granted as they deconstruct material aspects of our social environment that they find oppressive. Students also increase confidence in their power to modify certain oppressive aspects of our material world. Perhaps most importantly, the students enjoy these exercises and find them meaningful and transformative. I teach women’s studies courses at a small Franciscan liberal arts college, where conservative Catholic social norms and traditional gender norms prevail. Even many of our more politicized and activist students do not question the normative gendering of bodies and behaviors. I designed the capstone women’s studies seminar around the topic of Body Politics to encourage the students to engage the conservative ideologies and policies that condition female embodiment on campus. Additionally, I focus on female body issues because although my college’s emphasis on Catholic service for the less fortunate does cultivate student investment in the betterment of the community, it also often discourages women students from focusing on their own experiences of gender oppression: the traditional Catholic gender system defines a good woman as one who serves others and advocates for others, not herself. By addressing female corporeal experience, I encourage students to speak out for themselves, as themselves, and to become more aware of how embodiment and gendering pervade their lives. While most of the students who complete the women’s studies minor and who take this capstone course are cisgender, heterosexual women, lesbians, transmen, and gay and straight men also pursue the minor and take this class, and I encourage all students to bring their own social positions and perspectives to bear on our study of gendered embodiment. My curricular focus parallels a feminist turn toward materiality/corporeality in the twenty-first century. Published in 2008, the anthology Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, brings together a range of feminist scholars whose work focuses on the corporeality of the female body and its co-constitution or Material Feminist Practices in a Body Politics Seminar