GI428 Half Unit
Bodies, Culture and Politics
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Dr Leticia Ines Alexand Sabsay
Availability
This course is available on the MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Rights and Human Rights), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
Students should apply by 10am UK time on Friday 26 September 2025. Offers will be made after 10am on this date and will continue until all places are filled.
Priority is given to home department students and then to those who have the course listed in their programme regulations who apply in the first 24-hours (by 10:00am, Friday 26 September 2025), space permitting. Please note the timing of your request within the first 24-hours will not impact chances of being accepted onto the course. Requests received after this timeframe, or outside option requests, will be allocated randomly if space remains.
Please do not email the Course Convenor with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place. Contact gender@lse.ac.uk with any queries.
Course content
‘Bodies, Culture and Politics’ explores different understandings of "the human body," with a focus on how these have been mobilised by transnational artistic and cultural practices and politics of resistance. Bodies have been at the centre of debates within the social sciences and the humanities, and increasing attention has been paid to the significance of bodies in contemporary democratic politics. In the last decades, the uses of bodies and the arts in popular mobilisations and political activism have acquired renewed relevance, hand in hand with transnational dialogues and exchanges. Focusing on these trends, the course considers different theoretical approaches to bodies and embodiment (i.e. phenomenological, deconstructivist, materialist, psychoanalytic), and a set of related areas of inquiry, including the materiality of bodies, the differential value socially assigned to bodies, the affective dimension of embodiment, intersectional processes of racialisation, gendering and sexualisation, vulnerability, beauty ideals, and (dis)ability. These questions will inform our exploration of the imaginaries of the body mobilised by feminist and queer political art, activism, and cultural practices, as well as popular mobilisations and social movements.
Teaching
15 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
Formative assessment
Students will be expected to produce 1 project and 1 presentation in the WT.
Indicative reading
- Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology
- Butler, Judith (2014) Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly
- Crimp, Douglas (2002) Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics
- Griznik, Marina and Sefik Seki Tatlik (2014) Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life
- Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism
- Pollock, Griselda (2013) After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum
- Salamon, Gayle (2010) Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetoric of Materiality
- Tate, Shirley (2015) Black Women’s Bodies and the Nation: Race, Gender and Culture
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words)
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: 36
Average class size 2024/25: 18
Controlled access 2024/25: YesCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills