Art and Affects: Feminist Approaches

Course goals

After completion of the course, the student is:

• Familiar with the corpus of knowledge on feminist artistic and scholarly practice at the intersection of debates on art and affect.
• Able to apply this corpus of knowledge to a wide range of cultural and artistic practices and contemporary societal debates.
• Able to assess and analyze artistic practices from the methodological framework of feminist and affect studies.
• Able to transfer academic knowledge to the professional field in the social, political and cultural sector.
• Able to deploy and justify a variety of forms of knowledge production and genres, such as the short analytical essay, the collective expose, creative practice, and oral presentation.

Content

This course examines, with the support of gender, queer, critical race, and post- and de-colonial theories, different feminist approaches to the study of art and affect in relation to social transformation with the focus on concepts, such as shame, pain, hope/lesness, grief, anger, love and depression. With reference to art practices, the course explores the complex interplay between affect, emotion, and feeling. It does so through a critical interrogation of how certain affects and emotions adhere to bodies, cultures and sexualities; how they function as social power to pathologise others, and how reconfiguring the possibilities of affects and emotions is necessary for feminist, queer and anti-racist politics; how affect operates in artistic and activist practices; what affects, emotions and sensations feminist art can evoke? These are some of the questions that drive our inquiry into art and affect throughout this course. By studying a constellation of theories and artistic practices, the course thus investigates the centrality of affect for understanding social and political life.

Additional information

The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.