"Metamorphoses: Body as Rupture and Disruption” examines the queer way real and imagined bodies (human, animal, alien, cyborg) disrupt our traditional categories of thought, often irrupting in violent and troubling ways. These traditional categories (male/female, human/animal, normal/abnormal) were culturally constructed precisely to contain, manage, and control the fundamental unruliness of the human embodied experience. We will approach bodies from a non-normative, non-pathologizing perspective that combines queer theory, animal studies, posthumanism, performance theory, and the history of medicine to examine representations and interpretations of the body over the last two thousand years, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the 1st century CE to the disturbing testosterone-driven metamorphoses of Felker-Martin’s Manhunt from 2022.
This class will allow students to seek a holistic, humanist (and post-humanist) approach to thinking about the body at the intersection of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and the medical sciences. We will approach our readings through the use of a variety of multimodal assignments, from the creation of slideshows to zines and short fiction writing, to empower a student-driven exploration of class themes and questions.
About Professor Willow Tanner
Willow Tanner is an assistant professor in the Rutgers Writing Program. In graduate school, her advisor once remarked that she had "a perverse imagination." Her dissertation, The Melancholy Malcontent in Early Modern Theater and Culture, examines the roles of masculinity and affect in the 17th century's performance of an anti-politics of discontent. Her research interests are diverse, but orbit the intersection of theatricality, political philosophy, and queer phenomenology. She is also a poet whose work centers on themes of poesis, gender, ontology, and nihilism. She is currently trying to imagine a trans poetics of embodiment.