Material Feminist Practices in a Body Politics Seminar

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 interpenetration with the material world. Alaimo and Hekman explain that material feminisms “bring the material, specifically the materiality of the human body and the natural world, into the forefront of feminist theory and practice” (1). They also write, “An emerging group of feminist theorists of the body are arguing. . . . that we need a way to talk about the materiality of the body as itself an active, sometimes recalcitrant force. Women have bodies; these bodies have pain as well as pleasure. . . . We need a way to talk about these bodies and the materiality they inhabit” and to move beyond an exclusive focus upon social constructionism, to consideration of “lived experience,” “corporeal practice, and biological substance” (3–4).

The readings and assignments for my Body Politics seminar blend analysis of social constructionism with this consideration of corporeal practice and lived experience. Using an assortment of feminist studies of the body, the class focuses on cultural/social interpretations of the female body across cultures and time periods. Course topics include: changing interpretations of girls’ bodies, race and beauty, gender identities and gendering practices, eating patterns and body image, sexual desire, sexual identities, sexual assault and gender violence, illnesses and gender, disability and desire, cosmetic surgery, reproductive justice, and others.¹ The two project assignments that I share below ask students to engage further with such issues by using visual creativity and activism to materially intervene against destructive cultural/social/physical patterns and practices.

The Altered Artifact assignment asks student to choose a cultural artifact that plays a problematic role in girls’ or women’s lives and to consider the sociological, cultural, and historical importance of the object.² Students decide how to physically/materially alter their chosen object to highlight the issues that they are exploring, and they then write a paper explaining the problems with the material object and the ways they wish to challenge and reconstruct its presence in our lives. This...