The first of three required seminars for students in the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, this course will examine the history of Art History. We will consider the political and philosophical stakes of the discipline as it has changed from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, giving special attention to the concepts of the “visual” and the “historical” as they have been variously constructed over time. The aim of the course is to place our own deployments of these concepts, which are so important to Visual Studies, in a historical perspective that allows us to see them better.

This graduate-level visual studies seminar will investigate discourses of gender and sexuality in the figure of the Native Woman, across such diverse media as painting, missionary photography, ethnographic film, and found footage film that represent Bali, Java, Sumatra, and other islands of Indonesia from 1853 to the 1930s. Using postcolonial theory, art history, feminist theory, and film and media studies, we will explore critical themes including: conversion, time, modernity, sexuality, and the archive. Some of the questions that we will investigate are: what are the narratives of conversion in constructions of the Native Woman of Java, Sumatra, and Bali in painting, photography, and film; how did these constructions become codified in the years prior to 1935; how do these constructions relate to issues of spectatorship, narrative structure, and ideology; what were the haunting syncretic vestiges of pre-Western contact; and how can we move beyond the problem of representation of the European as the Voice versus the Native as the Silenced? The class will end with a study of the work of contemporary Indonesian women filmmakers around the themes of polygamy and women's sexuality.


Course Requirements:

Prompt attendance and participation at all classes and screenings, completion of all readings, noteboards due weekly, one presentation, research paper due on the last day of classes in tenth week. If you have more than two unexcused absences you will fail the class.

Anatomy of Gender/Gender of Anatomy: Early Modern Science, Representation and the Body.

Issues of gender and sexuality are central to the development of anatomical science in early modern Europe. From the 1543 publication of Vesalius' celebrated De humani corporis fabricaŠ, to William Hunter's equally celebrated Gravid Uterus of 1774, the female body in particular underwent a radical re-conceptualization that had repercussions well beyond the domain of medical science. Visual images played a critical role in this re-conceptualization of the body. Pictorial representations both reflected and influenced the scientific and biological construction of sexual difference. This course will focus on the rich history of anatomical representations and on the ways in which these images produced gendered, epistemological understandings of the body. We will start by discussing Thomas Laqueur's "one sex" thesis in his book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and then look at recent critiques of his ideas. Then, while exploring a wealth of visual material, we will discuss the cross-fertilization of erotic and anatomical prints in the Renaissance; the dialectical shifts between interior vs exterior views of the body and attempts to tame the uncanny; the persistence of moralizing sexual distinctions based on the prototypes of Adam and Eve and medieval humoral medicine; changes in the conceptualization of human reproduction and pregnancy; the life of certain allegorical associations with anatomical imagery and the early modern discourse on wonders, portents and "monstrous births" (including hermaphrodites). Included in the course will be visits to Special Collections at one or more of the following institutions: The Getty Research Center, The Clark Library, UCLA, The Huntington Museum and Library.