Seminar (SEM)

• Above class open to graduates only
• Topic: Hormones & Somatic Knowledge in Contemporary Art & Curation
• Above class meets with CULS-C 701

This experimental graduate course takes up a set of nested questions as its point of departure: Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormonality is productive in a hegemonically white hetero-patriarchal capitalist society? Whose hormonality is criminalized and to what ends? And how has a hormonal sensibility manifested materially, visually, sonically, temporally in contemporary art, curation, and exhibition history? Simultaneously, how have artists, curators, and art critics participated in, reproduced, questioned, or disrupted the idea of a ¿hormonally constructed body¿ (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? What might an aesthetics forged by the radical alliance of hormonal consciousness in art and curation, environmentalism, and social justice organizing look like? This graduate course begins from an understanding that hormones don¿t merely regulate our bodies. It posits instead that hormones and the ways they are managed¿through state-authorized laws or by means of fugitive, collective aid¿both reveal hormonal management as a regulatory technology through which the biopolitics of wellness and health is governed, while also offering a site and shared vocabulary for potential reworlding. From here, this course considers artworks, theories, and exhibitions that put pressure on how hormonality and somatic knowledge are at once integral to the making of art history, and¿yet¿historically marginalized within its discourses and exhibitions. With a focus on contemporary art, course topics will address biohacking, xenofeminism, eco-criticism, the financialization of hormonal management, glandular eugenics, medical apartheid, neurodivergent curatorial methods, decolonial concepts of health, queer abolitionist somatic art practice, and more. Weekly readings combine art historical and curatorial discourse with critical visual carceral studies, science studies, critical trans studies, critical disability studies, gender studies, and Black studies¿ critiques of Western enlightenment embodiment, biomedicine, and institutions of state power. Students from all disciplines are welcome, and especially those interested in the possibilities of somatic knowledge for a reframing of discourses of visuality, embodiment, and temporality in research, art practice, and curation. Ultimately, this course strives towards collectively reimagining an art history that aligns more closely with the radical vulnerabilities of artists who make art as a way of connecting, building knowledge, and living otherwise.