R Sanchez-Rivera

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. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

Students should apply by 10am on Friday 25 September 2026. 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 25 September 2026), 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.

GI428 Bodies, Culture and Politics introduces students to key theories and debates on the body and embodiment across the social sciences and humanities. The module examines how bodies are understood, regulated, represented, and contested at the intersections of science, culture, politics, and resistance. Throughout the course we will pay particular attention to the transnational and intersectional dimensions of embodied experience, exploring how ‘race’, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and other axes of difference shape both individual lives and broader social structures.

The course has two interconnected aims. First, it introduces students to major theoretical approaches to bodies and embodiment through a critical engagement with topics such as race and racialisation, scientific and medical discourses, gender and sexuality, social movements, and the politics of identity. Second, it investigates how bodies are mobilised, governed, and contested within contemporary social and political contexts, including activism, policing, inequality, commodification, nationalism, and the rise of far-right politics.

Theories of embodiment occupy a central place in contemporary scholarship on gender, identity, and power. At the same time, rapid social, technological, political, and cultural transformations continue to reshape how individuals understand and experience their own bodies and those of others. Drawing on examples from different contexts around the world, this module explores historical and contemporary developments in the meanings and politics of embodiment.

Across disciplines such as politics, history, sociology, medical anthropology, and critical public health, scholars have long examined the production of norms and the construction of so-called deviance. This module contributes to these conversations through a sustained focus on the body as both an object and a site of social and political struggle. Questions of power and resistance run throughout the course. Students will examine how bodies are shaped by social and institutional power relations; how power is experienced through gendered, racialised, classed, and otherwise differentiated bodies; and how individuals and activist groups use embodied practices to challenge inequality and oppression.

Finally, the module engages with debates on embodied epistemologies, considering the body not only as an object of analysis but also as a source of knowledge. Students will critically reflect on how embodied experiences inform the production of knowledge and the ways in which the body itself can serve as a site of inquiry within the social sciences.
 

30 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is taught in an interactive 3 hour class that includes lecture and seminar elements.

Students will be expected to produce 1 project and 1 presentation in the WT.

• Abel, Sarah (2021) Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body after the Genome
• 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
• Davis, Lennard J., ed.  (2017) The Disability Studies Reader. 
• 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
• Roberts, Dorothy E. (1999) Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. 
• 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
   

Essay (100%, 3000 words).