Course detail

Feminist Seminar 2

FaVU-FEMS2Acad. year: 2024/2025

Lectures and seminar sessions. Each lecture examines one feminist issue through relevant texts, the subsequent seminar facilitates discussion about thoughts introduced in the lecture. In preparation for the lecture, students are required to read two recommended texts. Sessions take place every other week.

Language of instruction

English

Number of ECTS credits

3

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

MgA. Lenka Veselá, M.A., Ph.D.

Department

Department of Art History and Theory (KTDU)

Offered to foreign students

Of all faculties

Entry knowledge

A keen interest in feminism and social justice issues.

Rules for evaluation and completion of the course

Credits awarded on the basis of home preparation (reading of recommended texts) and lecture and seminar participation. In case of a number of absences: writing an essay on some of the issues discussed in seminars.
Lectures and seminars take place at the premisses of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology every other week at designated times. Two absences are tolerated.

Aims

The course aspires to initiate a debate about social justice issues and how to address them in art, theory and activism.
Students will further their knowledge of feminist theory and gain insight into further feminist issues.

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

Not applicable.

Basic literature

Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature. In Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo, and Susan Hekman, 237–264. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (EN)
Gaard, Greta, and Lori Gruen. 1993. Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health. Society and Nature, 2, 1–35. (EN)
Hedva, Johanna. 2016. Sick Woman Theory. Mask Magazine, January 19. (EN)
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson. 2010. Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies. In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 1–47. Bloomington and Indiananapolis: Indiana University Press. (EN)
Preciado, Paul B. 2021. Can the Monster Speak? South Pasadaena: semiotext(e). (EN)

Recommended reading

Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. (EN)
Burns, Katelyn. 2019. The Rise of Anti-Trans “Radical” Feminists, Explained. Vox, September 5. (EN)
Clare, Eli. 2001. Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disabilty and Queerness. Public Culture, 13(3), 359–365. (EN)
Clare, Eli. 2017. Ideology of Cure. In Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, 3–20. Durham and London: Duke University Press. (EN)
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. 1973. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. New York: Feminist Press. (EN)
Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. (EN)
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough. The Sciences, March/April. (EN)
Grant, Melissa Mira. 2014. The Debate. In: Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. London and New York: Verso. (EN)
Halberstam, Jack. 2018. Toward a Trans* Feminism. Boston Review, January 18. (EN)
Hester, Helen, and Caroline Walters. 2016. Theorizing Fat Sex. Sexualities, 19(08), 893–897. (EN)
Hester, Helen. 2014. Pornographication and the Explosion of the Pornographic. In: Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (pp. 181—190). New York: SUNY Press. (EN)
Hester, Helen. 2018. What is Xenofeminism? In Xenofeminism, 6–32. Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press. (EN)
Chardronnet, Ewen. 2015. GynePunk, the Cyborg Witches of DIY Gynecology. makery, 30 June. (EN)
Chude-Sokei, Louis. 2016. Introduction. In The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, 1–15. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. (EN)
Kleeman, Jenny. 2020. Where the Magic Happens. In Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex, and Death, 5–27. Picador. (EN)
Lazard, Carolyn. 2013. How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity. The Cluster Mag, January 16. (EN)
Merchant, Carolyn. 2016. The Scientific Revolution and The Death of Nature. Isis, 97, 513–533. (EN)
Mies, Maria. 2014. The Need for a New Vision: The Subsistence Perspective. InMaria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, 297–324. London and New York: Zed Books. (EN)
Murphy, Michelle. 2004. Immodest Witnessing: The Epistemology of Vaginal Self-Examination in the U.S. Feminist Self-Help Movement. Feminist Studies, 30(1), 115–147. (EN)
Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London and New York: Bloomsbury. (EN)
Phillips, Rasheeda. 2015. Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice. The Afrofuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences. (EN)
Potter, Claire. 2016. Not Safe for Work: Why Feminist Pornography Matters. Dissent Magazine, Spring. (EN)
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Pornpower. In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, 255–317. New York: Feminist Press. (EN)
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. The Micropolitics of Gender in the Pharmacopornographic Era: Experimentation, Voluntary Intoxication, Mutation. In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press. (EN)
Segal, Lynn. 2015. Sexual Liberation and Feminist Politics. In Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. London and New York: Verso 2015. (EN)
Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. (EN)
Smith, Molly, and Juno Mac. 2018. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers` Rights. London and New York: Verso. (EN)

Classification of course in study plans

  • Programme VUM_M Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
  • Programme DES_M Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, elective
  • Programme FAAD Master's 2 year of study, summer semester, elective
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
  • Programme DES_M Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, elective
    1 year of study, summer semester, elective
    1 year of study, summer semester, elective
  • Programme VUM_M Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
  • Programme ZST-BX Bachelor's 1 year of study, summer semester, elective
  • Programme ZST-NX Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, elective

Type of course unit

 

Lecture

5 hod., compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

MgA. Lenka Veselá, M.A., Ph.D.

Syllabus

1. Ecofeminism — subsistence, commons, commoning, queer ecologies, hydrofeminism, Gynecene, SexEcology and Ecosexual manifesto, pollution is colonialism.
In this seminar we critically engage with the ecofeminist discourse on the parallel oppression of women and nature. Do women have a more insightful understanding of environmental damage and are they more uniquely positioned to fight its effects? We think about how to form strategic alliances resisting environmental violence and patriarchy without resorting to essentialist notions and normative understandings of sex, sexuality and “healthy reproduction” and how to point out environmental violence without framing bodies and environments as toxic, polluted and doomed. What are feminist alternatives to the imagined space of purity and healthy, toxic-free future prevalent in much of environmental activism?
2. Health and Care, Illness and Disability — feminist self-help, production and circulation of knowledge about sexual and reproductive health (DIY, DIWO and DITO, knowledge commons, open source, self-experimentation, biohacking), biopower and the production of health and disease, impairment/disability/handicap, ableism, crip theory, epistemology of pain, leaky bodies, networks of support.
In this seminar, we examine feminist, queer and crip perspectives countering the oppressive, heteronormative and ableist notions of what lives are worth living, whose bodies matter, whose health and well-being is of concern and whose pain and desires are taken seriously.
3. Prostitution and Pornography — sex as work and the “pornification” of work, sex robots,
sexuality and the politics of representation, obscenity and the codes of visibility, pornography after PornHub.
What is feminist stance on prostitution and pornography? Whose bodies are made visible in pornography and in what way? What kind of work is sex work? And what do we mean when we say that something (media, culture, labour, life) gets “pornified”? The focus of the seminar is on the technologization of sex and adult entertainment industries — how it transforms these industries, changes our understanding of pornography and sex work and makes lives of sex workers more precarious.
4. Afrofuturism and Black Technopoetics
In this seminar, we look at the relationship between race and technology — how technology has been racialized (articulated in relationship to race) and how race has been deployed as the grounds for dehumanization and enslavement. We consider the argument that the longstanding science fiction trope of robot revolution when machines revolt and destroy human beings mirrors fears and anxieties associated with slavery, colonialism and racial segregation. And finally, we look at how the connection between race and technology has been played out in Afrofuturism to create emancipatory narratives and imagine Afrocentric futures.
5. Transfeminism — cis/trans, transfeminism, shaping and breaking the binary, the proliferation of genders, gender abolitionism, xenofeminism, genderqueer futures.
The seminar on transfeminism advocates for inclusive feminisms and makes a case against the gender binary and for the plurality and multiplicity of genders — exploring the possibilities of nongendered, gender-optional and gender-queer futures.
6. Invited Lecture
7. Invited Lecture

Seminar

8 hod., compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

MgA. Lenka Veselá, M.A., Ph.D.