Sociology of the Body: Course Description| Soc 295 -- Fall 2002 -- Prof. Miliann Kang

Sociology of the Body| A cultural examination of the body as the product of complex social arrangements, processes, and structures. This site may use any of the following javascripts that your browser apparently does not support: (1) Break a page out of referring frames; (2) Image mouseovers; (3) Display the current date; (4) Detect users' browser and use appropriate style sheet.

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Professor	Miliann Kang Department of Sociology, Grinnell College
Phone	269-3124

Office Location & Hours	Carnegie 116C -- M, W, F 9-11 am & by appointment
Class Info	Fall 2002 Tues 10-11:50 am and Thurs 10-10:50 am Location: Science 2021
Prerequisite	SO 111 or GWS 111 or permission of the instructor

Western civilization has had persistent trouble in honoring the dignity of the body and diversity of human bodies.
-- Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 15

Race and gender oppression may both revolve around the same axis of disdain for the body.
-- Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 171

And now the news: women who love women are allowed to cherish their bodies as they are (if they want to).
-- Christine Donald, "Good Old Body," p. 49 in Ain’t I a Woman! A Book of Women’s Poetry from Around the World

The story is older than my body, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. For years we have been passing it on so that it may live, shift, and circulate.
-- Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other, p. 137

What is a body, and what is its relationship to the self? What are the social forces that shape human bodies and bodily experience? How do these forces vary in different societies and historical periods? How are different bodies perceived, valued and treated? In this course, we will examine the body not through the lens of the physical or biological sciences but as the product of complex social arrangements and processes. We will study the body as the container and expression of the self, as the object of social control, and as the repository of shifting race, gender and sexual categories.