Module 2- Performing Raced and Gendered Bodies

Over the past few weeks, we have explored several theories that have been used to theorize about the performance of race and gender. From Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" and Harry Elam's insightful essay "The Device of Race," to Michel Foucault's "Technologies of the Self"

these different theoretical and methodological approaches explore how subjectivities are produced within and through relationships to power.

As you think about the usefulness of these theories, how do you begin to understand the body and its relationship to power? How do the performances of artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, Nikki S. Lee and Cindy Sherman invite us to think reflexively about subjectivity and gendered processes of identification? How does the conscious choice to "play" performatives of race and gender allow artists to manipulate their bodies in order to interrogate the fluidity of race and gender boundaries? These questions are presented as prompts that may help you as you develop your written responses to the module this week.

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Module 1- Black and White Matters

Over the past few weeks we have read several texts that have given us some insight into the installation of the black-white binary as the guidepost for racial formation in the United States. After reading Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" and Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990's as texts that give you some insight into the racial trajectory mediated by the state and social relationships mediated by the law, what is your take and how do you understand these texts in relationship to some of the visual texts we have explored?