Week 2: Bauman, Week 4: Foucault, Week 7: Sennett, Week 8: all of the women

This week: feminism. Every other week had a bloke’s name for the title, and a chapter from their book to read and discuss. But this week? Feminism. I asked my students what they thought of this. They astutely noted that apart from me – the only female seminar tutor – the entire social theory course was taught by men, teaching content written by other men.

I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. There’s every reason to expose the students to Bauman, Foucault, Latour and so forth. But what of Butler or Haraway? I can think of a great lot of female theorists who would’ve been just as pertinent as  core reading for the biopolitics and biocapital week. What about Waldby? Cooper? This is something to take up when we evaluate the course at the end of the year.

It’s not about apportioning blame, I argued. Rather, it’s looking toward the systemic issue at play. We had a good discussion about this – my classes were mainly female, and we forecasted that maybe a social theory course in twenty years’ time would have some of their writings being taught to first years. Who can say!

Once we'd gotten the deep and meaningfuls out of the way, I introduced my students to Laura Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze, before deconstructing a Lynx advert, and the formulaic TV show “Take Me Out” which I’ve seen perhaps twice but that my students apparently watch all the time (when they don’t have work, they say, rather than instead of work…)

Apart from women's sexualisation, subservient to male sexual whim, we also unpicked the problematic reduction of men to the "end of the world, all I want to do is get laid" sentiment. We also had a discussion about whether it was heteronormative. Why, I asked, aren’t there any videos of guys spraying themselves and having other men leg it towards them? Somebody suggested that it was because there are more straight guys than gay, so it's marketed towards them. 

This lead on to a discussion of whether heteronormativity perpetuates straight sexual identities, or whether because people are generally straight, the worlds around them have become heteronormative. I wanted to get into John D'Emilio's thesis in Capitalism and Gay Identity from "Making Trouble" which could've brought us back to Marx, Engels and (re)production of the working classes. Alas, there are but sixty minutes in an hour...

First time with Foucault

Into the second term of my first year, and the module I'm teaching on is focusing now on contemporary theory. It's been enjoyable going back to basics on Foucault. I still remember the first time I was introduced to Foucault. It was probably the single most memorable moment of my studies as an undergraduate, and I hope to encourage my lot to recognise his valuable insights. Although it isn't core reading, I've requested that my groups look at the final chapter of the first volume of History of Sexuality and this week is shaped around biocapital, a recent rearticulation of specifically Foucauldian notions of the body as a site of regulation and (self)control.

This week, we'll be interrogating the various ways in which we are regulated and measured. In Britain, I often find myself driving down roads amazed at the amount of time spent regulating speeds, painting chevrons onto roads, installing crumpling roadsigns that won't kill us if we crash in them. Why are we forced to drive at 30mph in residential areas. Why do our governments want to keep us safe? Is it paranoia to assume there's a motive behind the seeming beneficence of highway maintenance? Does the government want to regulate our speeds to regulate our bodies? Why?

I wouldn't mind some fresh ideas about the ways in which our bodies are being regulated. I'll show these videos to illustrate the key point that regulation for foucault was specifically somatic. I hope that it will stimulate some discussion. With a few students from other countries, we might even get some international comparisons...

We'll move on to a discussion of biocapital after this, where I'll probably show another video and we'll discuss the ethical, political and economic tensions that might be at play in the contemporary bioeconomies.