The course will examine how masculinities and femininities are produced, remade, expressed and negotiated through theories of materiality and affect and relate them to relevant ethnographic examples of such processes (for example masculine soundscapes and edible portraits of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on chocolate pralines). We will explore gender in relation to the multifaceted dynamic processes unfolding in North Africa in the aftermath of earlier political fluxes, as well as today’s instabilities and unrest and tomorrow’s politics. Materiality and non-discursive forces, what can be called affective politics, impact our sense of belonging and desire for comfort in times of chaos, religious and political instability. Specifically we will focus on forces of affect and the material aspects of its public manifestation—the materiality of affect—through tangible manifestations of affects of passion: hate and love: two opposed but interlinked “emotions of revolution”, as well as their sibling, fear. The same material experiences can produce materialized emotions such as love or hate depending on specific political and social positioning within the larger polity. Passion is at once a phenomenological state and an extremely fluid currency of social, political and economic transaction. The experience of passion morphs continuously, changing valence while passing from hand to hand, body to body, circumstance to circumstance.
- Subject
- WMST G
- Credits (min)
- 4
- Credits (max)
- 4
- Credit unit
- points
- Type
- course
- Edition
- 2026
- Source
- catalog.barnard.edu