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Bodies in Public Class Notes
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Class and readings notes to Bodies in Public (Week 1 to 13)
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Week 1 - Introduction: Bodies/PublicRemembering the Crowd: Collective Action During the Pandemic
Aylin Kuryel, Begüm Özden Fırat
● The ways in which “culture” takes shape or place through the presence and construction
of identities and bodies in the public sphere.
● Intersections between national identity, nationhood, citizenship, ‘belonging’ and gender,
sexuality, embodiment, race/racialization.
● The relation between ‘culture’ and ‘politics’: are these separate domains? How do they
intersect?
Course Objectives
● Implement terminology associated with the intersections between and among: gender,
nation, race, religion and sexuality, and the ways in which these are used in
contemporary discourses and political practices.
● Identifying the dynamics through which literary and cultural objects impact social and
political conceptions of identity and belonging;
● Articulating the ways in which cultural representations attempt to express and respond to
differentiated forms of violence, marginalization and exclusions.
● Analyzing contemporary cultural objects and events in relation to theoretical texts;
conducting interdisciplinary research, read theory critically and represent and discuss
research topics through class discussion and essay writing.
https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/remembering-the-crowd-collective-action-during-the-pan
demic/
Feminist Movement in Turkey: 8 March
“...maintain a sense of solidarity, the idea of seeing, approaching, and being in a crowd seems
to generate a rather new—yet freakishly familiar—sense of danger”
● What a crowd is and does?
● What “distance” means?
● What forms of protest and collective action might look like during and after this crisis?
● Which intensifies existing inequalities and limits the possibilities for bodies to gather in
public space?
Public places are crucial for democracies.
These days reveal both paradoxes and potential, as well as the limitations of existing repertoires
of collective action. It is not difficult to predict that in the post-pandemic period, states that are
fed by unceasing crises will—like capitalism in general—try to expand their domains of power
,and strengthen technologies of surveillance and control, rendering individual bodies sources of
anxiety rather than political subjects
Preparation: Think of a cultural figure, event, image, or idea that brings up the questions of
bodies and the public in relation to your own cultural/political context or country of origin. If
possible, prepare to share on-screen a newspaper report, book, memorabilia, etc. in order to
discuss with peers in small groups.
Taiwan’s the only country to have successfully hosted a large-scale pride parade this summer
due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
, Week 2: Performing Identities
What are the ways in which national identities are constructed and performed,
historically, culturally, and effectively? How is the nation imagined, celebrated, and
“flagged” in daily life? What are the theoretical and methodological tools to critically
approach national identity?
Aylin Kuryel
The nation is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign. It is imagined because:
● Nation members do not know, see, meet each other.
● It is based on forgetting more than remembering.
● It is not a political awakening but an invention
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Eric Hobsbawm: “Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in
form but in substance, i.e., nationalist. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will continue.”
To be Nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.
● Does nationalism represent Marxism’s great historical failure?
● “National bourgeoisie” → A word-class
Three paradoxes of nationalism:
1. The objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in
the eye of nationalists.
2. The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept: the modern world
everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she has a gender, vs. the
irremediability particularity of its concrete manifestations/
3. The ‘political power’ of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherent.
Nationalism never had its own great thinkers → Emptiness
Flagging the Homeland Daily
The question still has not been answered directly: why do 'we', in established, democratic
nations, not forget 'our' national identity? The short answer is that 'we' are constantly reminded
that 'we' live in nations: 'our' identity is continually being flagged.
● Politicians are important in the electronic age because of them serving as “a familiar
figure”.
Michael Billig → Social psychologist
Nationalism losing its grounds in the mid 90s (1995)
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